Adventures in Yooperland

Yooperland? On Monday, June 16th, after our rally in Oshkosh finished up, we headed up to Escanaba in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Folks who live in the Upper Peninsula, or the U.P., refer to themselves as "Yoopers." Escanaba is a small city on the upper shores of Lake Michigan. We actually stayed at the Island Casino about 13 miles West of Escanaba. The casino had a nice little RV park in the back parking lot. We were accompanied on the journey from Oshkosh by some friends of ours, Paul Ferrenti and Barbara Lang. They are members of most of the same FMCA chapters as we are and are also full-timers. Went to the casino but didn't have much luck.

On Tuesday we went out geocaching with Paul and Barbara. They had never been caching and wanted to see what it was all about. They got very into it and have expressed an interest in becoming cachers. We found seven caches together and Paul found three of them on his own. One of the caches we found was our #100! This is a milestone for cachers. After our caching we had a nice dinner together.

Wednesday morning one of the caps in my mouth came loose. This is a pinned crown that seems to come loose at least once per year. I drove into Escanaba and found a dentist's office that was able to get me right in. The doctor took an Xray, glued the cap back on and I was out in less than an hour. Other than going back to the casino for dinner and a little gaming (unsuccessful), we didn't do much.

Thursday we packed up and headed East along the upper shores of Lake Michigan to St. Ignace. Paul and Barbara headed West - we will meet up again with them at the Full-timers rally in Hinckley, Minnesota. St. Ignace is the little town on the North side of the Straits of Mackinac. The Straits seperate Lake Michigan on the West side of Michigan from Lake Huron on the East side of Michigan. They also separate lower Michigan from the Upper Peninsula. The five mile long Mackinac Bridge connects the two Michigan's. Until the bridge was built in 1957 the only way to get to the U.P. was through Wisconsin like we came, or by ferry from Michigan. We settled into a nice little RV park on a hill overlooking Lake Huron.

Friday morning we got out early and headed over to Mackinac Island. This island is in Lake Huron, a couple miles off shore from St. Ignace. The island is only about six square miles in size and the only way there is by ferry from either St. Ignace or Mackinaw City, on the South end of the bridge. The interesting thing is that no motorized vehicles are allowed on the island. There is a state highway that runs around the perimeter of the island, but no cars or trucks. All transportation is by walking, horseback, horse and buggy, or bicycle. Many of the homes on the island are mansions that date back to the late 1800's or early 1900's. It is a very pretty and interesting place to visit. We spent most of the day there, going through some of the many shops and just walking around the island. We also did some geocaching there, finding 5 caches on the island.

On Saturday we decided to drive across the bridge to the lower part of Michigan and visit Mackinaw City. The drive across the bridge was pretty cool, the bridge is four lanes, but only the two outside lanes are paved with asphalt, the two inside lanes are open grid work. The center of the bridge is 200 feet above the water and the bridge is five miles long. It is a toll bridge, but the toll is only $3 each way. While in Mackinaw City we did some shopping and some geocaching. We found five more caches down in lower Michigan. That night we had dinner back in St. Ignace on the North side of the bridge at a little restaurant in downtown called the Marina Pub. The food was very good and I would recommend it to anyone staying in the area.

On Sunday we packed up for the arduous 55 mile trip north on I-75 to Sault St. Marie. This town is in the area where the St. Mary's River connects Lake Superior to the West to Lake Huron to the East. Our original plan was to stay at the Elks Lodge where they had four water/electric sites right on the river. When we got to the lodge there was one open site, but the grass was about 18 inches tall so we decided to go to the RV park about a half mile down the road. The RV park was also on the river, only six dollars more than the lodge and we were able to park on pavement. We had a great view, facing the river, and were able to watch the big ships go up and down the St. Mary's River. The center of the river is the dividing line between the U.S. and Canada so we were looking into Canada from our site.

After we got settled into the park we went to do some sightseeing in Sault St. Marie. We went downtown and poked around in the shops for a little while, then went across the street to the Corps of Engineers park where the Soo Locks were. Unlike the Straits of Mackinac, where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are the same height, the surface of Lake Superior is 21 feet, on average, higher than that of Lake Huron. The only way to get ships between the two lakes was to construct large locks to raise and lower the ships, depending on the direction they were traveling. The visitors center had a very interesting history of the locks at this site, the first of which was built in the early 1800's. Right now there are four large locks on the American side of the river and two on the Canadian side. Most of the large shipping traffic goes through the American side since those are the largest locks, over a thousand feet long and two hundred feet wide. While we were there a large freighter came into the locks from Lake Huron (the lower lake) and we watched as they brought the ship into the lock, pumped up the water raising the ship 21 feet or so, then letting it out onto Lake Superior. It was very interesting to see how this process worked and to find out that there are some 60 million tons of shipping through the locks each year. That's a lot of ships!

On Monday we got up early to go to Canada for the day. There is a large bridge over the river that connects the two countries. It only took us about 5 minutes to go through the Canadian entry point, although they did ask a lot of questions. We spend several hours driving around looking at the sites in Sault St. Marie, Ontario, Canada, then did some geocaching. (Yes, there are caches all over the world) We found six caches in Canada. We then went by the Canadian Elks Lodge in Sault St. Marie, Ontario. We introduced ourselves and showed our American BPOE cards and were welcomed into the club. We had a couple of drinks and chatted with several of the guys in the bar. I was amused to note that Canadians (at least this bunch) really did say "hey" a lot! We got our first Canadian Elks Lodge pin for our banner. After we left the lodge we stopped at the duty free store located just before you got onto the bridge back to the USA. We found that booze was very cheap compared to the prices we had seen elsewhere in the Midwest USA. We bought two 1.75 Ltr. bottles of Absolute for $29.95 each - they sold for over $42 in the stores in Michigan and Wisconsin. The gal at the store told us that we would have to pay duty on the bottles when we went back to the States, but that it was only about $4 a bottle which still made it a bargain. I put the bottles on the back seat in plain view and we headed across the bridge. When we got to the entry post we gave the Immigration Officer our passports and he asked a couple of questions, including what we were doing in Canada. We told him we had gone over for some sightseeing and to do some geocaching. He asked what that was and we had a five minute conversation about what geocaching was. He handed our passports back and told us to go ahead. He never asked if we brought anything back.

Tuesday afternoon we decided to do a little geocaching around the Sault St. Marie, Michigan area and found another six caches. Afterwards we went by the Elks Lodge where we were originally going to stay. It was a very pretty lodge with a great view of the river, but not especially friendly. We chatted with some folks at the bar, but they were visiting Elks also, staying in the RV park.

Wednesday, the 25th of June, we left Sault St. Marie and headed West to Ishpeming, Michigan. this is a small town just West of Marquette, Michigan on the shore of Lake Superior. The next day, Thursday, we drove into Marquette so Jackie could go to the urgent care facility. She seems to have a real bad cold or allergies and was feeling pretty lousy. The docs gave her some prescriptions and we drove around Marquette for a while, waiting for the Elks Lodge to open. We then stopped there and visited for a couple of drinks. The Marquette Lodge was very nice and very friendly. From there we drove about six miles West to the town of Nagaunee and stopped at the Elks Lodge there. Also a nice friendly lodge. When we left there we finally stopped at the Ishpeming Lodge, which was only about two miles from the RV park we were staying at. All three lodges had about 500 members or so and were very friendly. All three also had lodge pins available so we were able to add to our banner.

On Friday we packed up and headed West out of Michigan and back into Wisconsin, stopping at the little town of Saxon. Saxon is about 21 miles East of Ashland, which is a moderately large town. However, Saxon is in the middle of nowhere. We pulled into the RV park and found that it was an RV park, gas station and bar, all rolled into one. You registered for the park and bought your gas inside the bar. However, the park turned out to be OK, back in a little meadow surrounded by woods. Big sites with full hookups and pretty inexpensive. Unfortunately, there was NO phone service, NO wifi, and NO T-mobile Internet. Since we were only there two nights it was no big deal, but it was different to be completely out of touch for the first time in many months. That afternoon we drove into Ashland to see if we could find a laundry to wash clothes, but didn't find anything satisfactory. We drove by the Elks Lodge, which was a very large building with a golf course, however, Jackie was still feeling puny so we didn't go in. We thought we might go back the next day, but on Saturday Jackie was still not feeling well, so we stayed in for the day.

On Sunday we headed out of the North Woods and crossed into the great state of Minnesota at Duluth. Duluth, and its Wisconsin twin Superior, sit on the shore of Lake Superior at its far Western end. From there we headed south on I-35 towards the town of Hinkley, Minnesota and our first rally of the 2008 summer series. With that we will end the saga of Yooperland and pick up next time with our rally adventures. We will be going to five rallies over most of July, all of them within a hundred miles or so of Minneapolis/St. Paul.

We will catch you all up on the happenings after the rally tour. Until then, stay safe, have fun and enjoy your life. We are enjoying ours!

Milwaukee - Roy's Boyhood Home

Schlitz, Blatz, Pabst - the beers that made Milwaukee famous. Pabst is still around, but now as a limited production “designer” brew instead of the blue collar working man’s beer it was when I was a kid. The rest are just memories. Maybe I didn’t make Milwaukee famous, but I did live there the first 12 years of my life, so a visit to my childhood home was on our agenda. We left Portage, Indiana on Wednesday the fourth of June and headed North. The weather was much nicer than it was when we visited Chicago the day before - however, the traffic through the Chicago area was heavy and the roads were horrible. They were rough, torn up and frost heaved, or they were under construction. The freeway was under construction from downtown Chicago all the way to the Wisconsin border. Needless to say, when we arrived in Milwaukee I was ready for a cocktail and a little relaxation. We settled into the State Fair RV Park which is on the grounds of the Wisconsin State Fair in West Allis. The park was all paved parking lot but it had full hookups and was right in the middle of town which made it real convenient for sightseeing around Milwaukee.

The next day we did the “Roy’s childhood” tour. I only remember the four places we lived from about age 6 and I was able to find all four houses, or in one case where the house used to be before the state bought it and built a freeway over the site. I also found all four of the schools I went to during this period. The picture here is the last place my mom, brother Dennis and I lived in before we packed up and moved to Arizona with my soon to be step-dad Russ. The house was a duplex and we lived up on the top floor of the house. I was in seventh grade when we left Milwaukee in 1960. The next picture is of the apartment building in which my parents lived when I was born in 1947. They lived in the first apartment on the right side of the building. I know this because the address is on my birth certificate. The building is still occupied as apartments, although the neighborhood is kind of seedy. We spent most of the afternoon driving around different parts of the south-central area of the city that we lived in with me pointing out different childhood memory locations to Jackie like some crazed personal tour guide. The only thing I wasn’t able to find that I thought I clearly remembered was my aunt’s house where I used to spend a lot of my time as a kid. Her youngest son, Roger, was the same age as me and was probably my best friend growing up. I knew the area within a couple blocks, but never could pinpoint the house.

Later on in the afternoon we visited the Milwaukee Elks Lodge # 46. The lodge is now located way north and west of downtown, but in a very nice building. They have about 400 members. The group at the bar when we visited was very friendly. That evening we went to a Cajun restaurant in downtown West Allis, about two miles from the RV park. We had found the restaurant, called Crawdaddies, in a local tour book and decided to give it a try. It turned out to be one of the best restaurants we have ever been to. The food was outstanding and the service was great. It was true Cajun food, but not overly hot, just the right amount of zing. They also had a great tee shirt which, of course, I had to buy. I would strongly recommend that anyone visiting Milwaukee check out this place. It is at about 71st Avenue and Greenfield Road in West Allis. You won’t find better Cajun outside of New Orleans.

The next day we headed out in the afternoon intending to visit Kenosha, Wisconsin, South of Milwaukee. Jackie lived in Kenosha for about a year with her first husband back in the early 60's and wanted to see if she saw anything she remembered down there. We decided to stop on the way at a costume shop in West Allis to see if they had any pirate costumes. The rally we are going to next week in Oshkosh has a pirate theme. That shop had something for Jackie, but didn’t have what I wanted in my size. But they had another store in one of the northern suburbs that the sales clerk called and they did have it, so we drove up there. In the course of all this chasing around looking for costumes the weather turned bad with heavy rain and the promise of more to come so we decided to wait until the next day to do Kenosha and headed back to the coach for the rest of the day.

The next morning we headed down to Kenosha and spent several hours driving around the area. Unfortunately, Jackie couldn’t remember much about the area and we were unable to find any of the places she lived or remembered. Since we were already down south, I decided to head west to Elkhorn, Wisconsin, where my grandparents lived when I was young. They lived in a farming area near town and close to a lake, however, the area has grown up so much that I was not able to figure out where the house might be. I also couldn’t remember the name of the lake and the maps we had didn’t show the names of the nearby lakes. I have since remembered that the lake was Wandawega and I have found the area on a map. So if we are ever back in the area I think I will be able to find the place. After striking out both places we headed back to the RV park to relax before leaving to head for Oshkosh the next day. Not much relaxation as about 4:00 in the afternoon the tornado warning siren went off and we had to head for the shelter (the office/restroom complex) and ended up being there for over two hours while this torrential set of thunderstorms came through. Luckily there were no tornadoes at the park, but one was sighted at the zoo only about three miles to our north. We have pretty much decided we don’t care for the weather in the Midwest!

The next morning, Sunday the eighth, we headed up to Oshkosh, Wisconsin for our rally. The rally, being held at the county fairgrounds, was being put on by the International Area (abbreviated INTO) of the Family Motor Coach Association (FMCA). For those who don’t know, FMCA is subdivided into a whole series of geographical areas. (Western, Eastern, Southeastern, Etc) Each area then has numerous Chapters set up around common interests. The International Area was created to be the area for those Chapters who were national in scope and didn’t have a particular geographical component. All of the chapters we belong to, such as Monaco International, Elks International, Full-timers, are INTO chapters. Like most area rallies this would be fairly small (200 coaches or so) compared to the full FMCA conventions like the one in St. Paul in July which will have two or three thousand coaches.

I had been asked to serve as a volunteer captain by the rally chairman, so although the actual rally didn’t start until Thursday evening, we were asked to arrive early, so we came up Sunday afternoon. My job was to set up all the signs around the rally site, including the directional signs on the roads coming into the fairgrounds, and all the various signs in the parking lot and inside of the buildings. It is amazing how many signs you need at a large rally! I spend most of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday making and putting up signs. On Thursday the rally started with the evening entertainment and the group was the Marlin’s. We had seen them once before at a Monaco rally in North Carolina. They were very good and played a mix of oldies along with some comedy bits. It rained most of the afternoon and night and there were periods when the rain was so heavy you couldn’t see across the parking lot. Fortunately, most of us were parked on blacktop or gravel. There were a few people parked on grass and at one point the water got so high in one spot the rally master had to air up his coach airbags to keep the water from getting into his storage bays.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday were the rally days. Fortunately, the weather changed and was very nice for the rest of the rally. There were only a couple dozen vendors at this rally so it didn’t take too long to go through the shopping. We had also been to most of the seminars at previous rallies, so we didn’t attend too many of those. I had to get up early each morning because in addition to being utilities captain, I was also the sound engineer for the Frustrated Maestros at breakfast. The Maestros are another FMCA chapter that provide amateur entertainment at rallies. I had be up and set up each morning by 7 a.m. Yikes! Also, on Friday afternoon I was the MC and DJ for a chapter fair and block party. I played music and ran some contests. This was the major event that was pirate themed. They had costume contests for men and women and a beard contest. Both Jackie and I wore our pirate costumes and looked pretty good, I think. The entertainment for Friday night was an old guy who used to do sound effects for Warner Brothers cartoons and for Disney. He put on a pretty funny show. Saturday night was a jazz band that was OK and did manage to get people up dancing.

One thing we did do on Sunday was finally sign up for our Alaskan tour. We have waffled back and forth about going to Alaska and finally decided to do it. We signed up for an escorted tour with Fantasy RV Tour and will be going in June of 2009. It’s a 48 day tour and should be a lot of fun. We decided that it would be better for us to go up with a group which included some professional guides rather than do it on our own. When we talked to the lady with the tour company we were originally looking at Mexico tours, but after looking at the timing and the costs, we decided we would rather do the Alaskan one first.

Sunday was the last day of the rally so I spent most of Sunday afternoon going around taking down all the signs I had put up the week before. We thought we might have to stay over on Monday to help clean up the rest of the rally, but we got everything that had to be done finished by late Sunday evening. We came back for Bingo Sunday night and Jackie and I both won, me $60 and her $75. Yea!

Monday morning and the rally is over. I had a brief 8:00 a.m. meeting of the captains for “debriefing” and then we were off to our next destination, the upper peninsula of Michigan. The report on that part of our journey will have to wait for the next blog.

Remember, life is a journey not a destination - enjoy the trip!

The Greatest Spectacle in Racing - The Indy 500

Yikes, its been almost three weeks since my last post! Time flies when you're having fun, and have we ever! Last time we had arrived in Springfield, Illinois on our way to Indianapolis for the big race. While in Springfield we did some sightseeing around the Illinois capitol. We spent several hours touring the Dana-Thomas house. This is a very large, beautiful home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in the early 1900's. We also toured the old Illinois capitol building and walked around downtown checking out all the "Lincoln slept/lived/worked here" stuff. Lincoln is very big in Springfield!

On our last day in Springfield we did some geocaching around the general area. Many of the caches were in various parks along the shore of Lake Springfield, a very nice lake at the south edge of town. We managed to find eight caches. A couple of the finds took us to old abandoned sections of original Route 66, which was a concrete divided roadway through this area before the freeway came. We also made a couple more visits to the Elks Lodge and found them to be a fairly friendly group.

On Wednesday, May 21st we left Springfield and traveled East to Crawfordsville, Indiana, about 35 miles Northwest of Indianapolis. We wanted to be able to arrive fairly early at the racetrack on Thursday for our rally, so we planned a one night stay at Crawfordsville. On Thursday morning we arrived at the track about noon and were able to get settled in. The rally parking was on a nice level gravel parking lot right across the street from the south end of the race track. We were only three coaches in from the street, very convenient for viewing the craziness of race weekend. (More about that later)

After we settled in we walked over to the track and spent a couple hours walking around the infield area where there were a bunch of sponsor booths and souvenir stands set up. One of the party tents was sponsored by Jim Beam and when you went in, you got a wrist band with two detachable tabs, each one good for one free drink! Since Jackie doesn't drink bourbon, I managed to get five nice cocktails! (one return trip the guy didn't take my tab) Yea for walking distance parking! Also got to drive the race car simulator - like a video game on steroids. The cockpit was on hydraulic legs for motion simulation and you were all belted in and hunkered down just like in the Indy cars. There was a big TV screen in front of you and away you went on a simulated banked oval. If you got down too low on the track, or up against the wall, the simulator would shake the beejeebees out of you. Quite a lot of fun. Didn't even have to pay for the fun because it was sponsored by AAA and you got to ride it if you were a member.

The next morning was Friday, which is "Carb Day" at the track. This is the day when the Indy cars get their last practice session before the race on Sunday. It was named carb day from the days when cars actually HAD carburetors and they would do the final fuel calibrations. Of course, everything is electronic controlled fuel injection now, but we found out over the course of our stay here that tradition is very big at Indy. There was also supposed to be a 100 mile Indy Lights race in the afternoon. The Indy Lights are to the Indy cars as the NASCAR Busch cars are to the the Cup cars. They "only" go about 185 mph rather than the 225 that the big boys drive. Jackie woke up Friday morning with another bout of vertigo and decided to skip the activities at the track. I packed up and headed over about 10 to watch the practice session. They got in about two laps and the rain started. It then rained on and off the rest of the day, cancelling both the final practice session and the Indy Lights race. I finally gave up about 2:00 and headed back to the coach. We spent the rest of the day doing some light shopping and checking out the area. Our rally also included a dinner Friday night, however, it was set up as an outside event with no tent or shelter. Although it was raining, most everyone from the rally came over to the catering area and loaded up from the buffet line. It was a basic fried chicken, beans and coleslaw kind of meal, so we were able to just take it back to the coach and eat. No camaraderie with your fellow campers, but hey - free food.

Saturday there are normally no activities at the track, however, because of the rain on Friday they rescheduled the Indy Lights race for noon. The weather was nice again and Jackie was feeling better, so we headed over to the track to watch the race. There were no assigned seats for this event so we watched from the bleachers right behind the pits on the front straight. The race was pretty good, although from our seats we weren't high enough up to really see anything except about 100 feet of the track. Also, since it was only a 40 lap race, there was no pit activity to watch. After the race we went back to the campground and noticed a significant increase in activity along 16th street, the road that runs along the south edge of the speedway. As the afternoon wore on, the number of motorcycles and cool cars continued to increase until it was a continual parade. Come to find out, Saturday night before the race is the "happening" night. 16th street becomes a cruising site from the corner of 16th and Georgetown, which is the main entrance to the track, to a place called Mike's Speedway Lounge, about a mile east. We had actually been told about Mike's by someone we met at an Elk's Lodge in Colorado. He told us that Mike's was a "have to visit" place.

About 6:00 we drove down to Mike's and found a relatively dive bar with about three hundred motorcycles in the parking lot. We went in, had a couple drinks and ate dinner there. They only had sandwiches, but they were pretty good. Afterwards we took a couple drinks outside and sat on the grass at the side of road next to the parking lot and just watched the bikes and cars cruising in and out of Mike's and the bar across the street. The music was playing and people were having fun. Apparently, the police suspend the drinking in public laws unless you are creating a disturbance or driving because everyone in the parking lot and walking on the street had a drink in their hand. About 8:00 we went back to the campground and found everyone from the rally sitting in their lawn chairs along the side of 16th street. As the night came there were literally hundreds of motorcycles going up and down the street, thousands of people walking around and everyone having a great time. About 11:00 the people from the rally started to head back to their coaches, so Jackie and I took a walk down towards Georgetown Road. This road runs north and south along the west side of the speedway. We found that they closed the road to traffic and let folks set up booze and souvenir booths along the street. There were about 25,000 people walking around the streets partying and it was almost midnight. There were cops all over the place, but while we were walking around we didn't see anything except people having a good time. I chatted with one Indy cop and he told me that about 2:00 in the morning they would get a few fights breaking out and that the party would go on until probably 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. We went to bed about 1:00 and fell asleep by the sound of motorcycles cruising the street. This has to have been one of the more interesting and entertaining "events" we have been a part of since we started travelling.

Sunday morning, Race Day. The race was scheduled to start around 1:00, but we went over about 10:00. We wanted to experience the whole happening so we had lunch at one of the vendors and then went up to our seats. We actually had great seats about two thirds of the way up the grandstand which was right in the middle of the "short chute" between turns one and two. We were up high enough to see both turns, the short straight between them and a little bit of both front and back straightaways. There are no seats at Indy that let you see the whole track, so ours were pretty good. We watched all the pre-race stuff, the parade of drivers, a salute to veterans with about a hundred uniformed folks from all services parading around the track in pickup trucks. Good old Gomer Pyle (Jim Nabors) sang Back Home in Indiana like he does every year. Florence Henderson did God Bless America (she apparently does it every year too) and Jackie and I both decided she probably ought to retire. The little cutie from Dancing with the Stars, Juliane Hough did a great job with the National Anthem. The flyover was a group from the Navy Top Gun school and was two Navy F-18 Hornets and two F-16's decorated as "aggressors" with a big red star on the side. Gee, I wonder who they're supposed to represent?

The race went for almost five hours, which is a long time to be on a hard metal bench with no backrest, but we brought booze. It was a great race and until you actually attend a race you don't appreciate the colors and noise the cars make and how fast they are actually going. TV is a comfortable way to watch a race, but being there makes a big difference in how you appreciate the sport. I had found the same thing in my previous attendance at NASCAR races. There were a couple of wrecks on our end of the track, and the paper the next day said there were more accidents at this race then in the last 10 years. No big wrecks though, and no one hurt. One of the nice things about our seats was that not only did we have a good view of a pretty large section of track, we had one of the big "Jumbo-tron" TV screens in the infield right in front of us. That way we were able to easily keep up with what was going on around the rest of the track. The best thing about the seats was that after the race we got up and eight minutes later we were sitting in a lawn chair with a drink watching the other 350,000 fans try to get out of the track and out of the area. Interestingly, within three hours there was no one on the street. When I lived in Phoenix, it would take four hours just to get out of the track parking lots after the NASCAR race.
On Monday morning, Memorial Day, we headed out of the rally site for a campground on the other side of Indianapolis, actually about 30 miles East of town. We went there to visit with some good friends of ours, Randy and Charlene Basom. These are folks that we met on the road the first year we were traveling. They are also fulltimers and have the same year and make of coach we have, with the same exterior paint scheme. We have met up with them several times over the last couple years as we wandered the country. Their daughter Amy, and her husband John, live in a small town East of Indianapolis. Amy has just had her first baby, a little girl named Abby. We had been with the whole family last 4th of July in Washington and this was when Amy had found out she was pregnant, so Jackie thinks of herself as an adopted aunt. We wanted to spend a few days with the five of them. The first night, Monday, we met them at a local restaurant for dinner in celebration of Amy's birthday. The second day we went over to John and Amy's place for the afternoon and for a BBQ dinner there. Randy and Charlene have their motorhome parked in the yard next to the barn. They have been staying there for about four months helping while Amy was pregnant. The third day we were there we again spent the afternoon with the group, but this time we took them out geocaching. Randy and Charlene had never heard of it before we talked to them about it and they thought they might enjoy it. We went out and found six caches in a couple hours that afternoon and Randy and Charlene were hooked.

On Thursday morning we bid farewell to the Indianapolis area and started north towards Elkhart, Indiana. Elkhart and the surrounding area are an RV manufacturing center. Monaco Coach has a couple of factories there and also has a factory service center. Our coach was due for its annual service (oil, lube, filters, etc.) and we thought since we were going to be in the area anyway we would go to Monaco for the service. The service center has a free campground for customers so we checked in and got set up. The down side to using the factory service center is that they start work at 6:30 a.m. We don't normally do anything before nine or ten in the morning, so having to get up at five to have the coach ready to roll into the garage at 6:30 was tough on us. Friday morning came and we managed though and by 8:00 we were eating breakfast! Another unusual event for us. They finished off the coach late in the afternoon so we parked back in the campground, planning to leave for the Chicago area first thing Saturday morning. Saturday morning we packed up the coach and got on the freeway heading towards Chicago. Right after we started I noticed that the transmission temperature gauge was very erratic and was jumping all over the dial. One of the things I had serviced on Friday was the transmission. Since the problem hadn't existed before Friday, I guessed that the tech had either broken a wire or left one loose. Since I didn't want to travel with a malfunctioning gauge, we turned around and went right back to Camp Monaco and set up again. We relaxed on Saturday and on Sunday decided to go and do some geocaching in the area since we were stuck there anyway. We managed to find nine caches, all right in the downtown Elkhart area. We found several very nice parks we would never have seen were it not for our geocaching hobby.

On Monday morning I got the service writer at 7:00 and told them about the problem. They took the coach right into the garage and by 9:00 it was fixed and we were ready to roll. It had been a loose connection on the sending unit, probably bumped during the servicing of the coach. Since we were only going to be able to spend two days in the Chicago area because of the delay in getting out of Elkhart, we elected to stay at a campground in Gary, Indiana, about 25 miles from Chicago. The next morning, Tuesday the 3rd of June, we headed into Chicago for some sightseeing. Unfortunately, it poured down rain the whole day so we weren't able to do any real walking around. We drove around the city and looked at the sights as best we could, but we really couldn't do it justice. I guess we will just have to come back to Chicago someday. We will be leaving for Milwaukee, the city of my birth, on Wednesday morning. Our stay there will be the topic of my next blog chapter.

Until then, keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down!