Missouri, Kansas City - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - Harrah's Casino

We are back on the road.  This year we decided to cut our visit to Indiana short so we could take what will probably be a once in a lifetime four month trip though the Northwest states and down the California coast before heading back to Mesa, AZ for the winter.  Today was a beautiful day to travel.

Right now we are sitting in Harrah’s Casino parking lot, generator is running and we have all the comforts of home while we watch the college baseball world series.  We went to the casino earlier to make a deposit and to eat dinner at the buffet.

We left our site in daughter Amanda’s driveway on Sunday afternoon to go to Whiteland Goodyear tire service center.  Since they work on a first-come-first-served basis we wanted to be first in line on Monday morning.  They started on our tire rotation, balance and alignment at 7:00 am, $325 and 8 hours later we were out of there.

We headed to St. Louis from there.  We had a reservation for the night at the Casino Queen campground, which is where we stop every time we go through St. Louis.  The weather turned bad just after we got there.  Greg looked at the weather app on his phone and we decided to extend our stay by another night instead of driving through the rain the next day.  That proved to be a great decision, we had some really strong storms come through. 

During a brief dry period Greg decided we might as well go ahead a replace the coach batteries since we were getting some flicker in our lights and the batteries we had weren’t holding charge like they should.  The batteries we had in the coach were a retirement gift to Greg from one of the vendors he worked with, they were put in in 2011 so I think we got a lot of good out of them.  Too bad we couldn’t get the new ones as a gift, we need four of them and those rascals don’t come cheap.  We had to drive to O’Fallon to get them.  By the time we got back it was starting to rain again so Greg installed them while I held a large golf umbrella over him.  I am so glad he knows how to do this kind of stuff!

In the morning we will be headed north through Nebraska into South Dakota where we will stay in Rapid City for a week seeing all of the sights around there.

Although our Indiana visit was short it was jam-packed with visits with family and friends.  Amanda had a long to-do list for us to work on to get ready for granddaughter Mackenzie’s graduation open house.  Daughter Robyn and granddaughter Maddie were home for a week from Virginia, so good to see them!  We got to see grandson Jackson and great grandson Braxton play baseball.  We saw granddaughter Braelynn compete in a swim meet.  I carved out some special time for a few lunches with my mom and daughter Desira and had lunch with a few of the ladies I went to high school with – Dinah, enjoy that great new kitchen!  Friends Mike and Susan and Bill and April and Greg’s sisters and their husbands were kind enough to work with our busy schedule so we could spend a couple of hours with them.  Seemed like we were busy all the time and still couldn’t spend nearly enough time with everyone, can’t wait to hug you all again.  Rest assured you are all in our thoughts as we enjoy our travels, wish we could take you all with us.

In addition to our socializing we got in all of our doctor and dentist visits.  We have a clean bill of health until next year.

This afterthought is especially for daughter Amanda who hates toads.  On Monday morning I went into the bathroom without my glasses on, turned on the water in the sink and something large moved in the sink – exit bathroom!  After I got my glasses on I realized it was a toad, Greg did the dirty work of getting him out.  Our only guess is that it came up through the sewer hose, hope he didn’t bring friends.  We invest in scorpion spray in Arizona, maybe we should look into toad spray for our Indiana stay.