June 3, 2024 – Day 80 Kalona City Park, Kalona City Iowa – Starved Rock Family Campground, Utica, Illinois Before heading out, we needed to get that flat tire fixed. Paul found a tire place in town and there was a 2 hour wait! That was just too long on a travel day so he decided to drive the half hour to Iowa City. The first place he stopped could do the job and fixed it in just a few minutes. The service was so fast he couldn’t get to enjoy the luxurious waiting room. He next went to a Harbor Freight to buy the breaker bar and a small…

June 2, 2024 – Day 79 Kalona City Park, Kalona City Iowa We just hung out today, played some games probably, blogged — maybe. It’s just that now a more than a week after we got home we can’t remember. That’s what happens when the travel switch flips and you start stringing long travel days together. We do remember dinner though. And that the special thing over in Riverside, IA was closed tomorrow. Finding good pizza on the road can be a challenge. Based on reviews, we headed over to have dinner at the Kalona Brewing Company. On the way over the TMPS beeped, “low pressure.” We can still roll…

June 1, 2024 – Day 78 Walnut Creek State Recreation Area, Papillon, NE – Kalona City Park, Kalona City, IA Having decided to ignore the possibility of a malfunctioning engine, and in the true tradition of SCCA rally, just Press on Regardless. Really, what other options did we have? Our destination was a small town outside Riverside, Iowa. The plan was to spend the night and then head into Riverside for a very exciting day! But you’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Let’s get there first. Like Nebraska, Iowa is pretty boring. But unlike Nebraska, Iowa looks like what you’d expect Iowa to look like. It’s flat and has really…

May 31, 2024 – Day 77 Lake Manawa State Park, Council Bluffs, IA – Walnut Creek State Recreation Area, Papillon, NE Someone did call us back around 8:30AM. They found us a truck place that handled gasoline engines! We had to “bang a youie” and drive about 30 minutes back into Nebraska and away from home. We couldn’t stay at Lake Manawa since they were full for the weekend. That meant finding another campground in the Omaha area where choices are already pretty limited — on a weekend. We headed out to the garage with no Plan A or Plan B in place to find out what was up with…

May 30 2024 – Day 76 Lake Manawa State Park, Council Bluffs, IA We woke up in the morning ready to get the chip in the windshield taken care of. Around 8:15 we started to get ready to leave camp. We had a 9AM appointment and it was on the other side of Council Bluffs, IA. Paul started up the RV and it was running rough. BANG…BANG. Paul shut if off. He crawled under to see if anything had broken or exploded but everything looked ok. He started it again and it was fine. We drove to the glass shop. The revs dropped at a traffic light. He put it…

May 29, 2024 – Day 75 Victoria Springs State Park, Anselmo Nebraska – Lake Manawa State Park, Council Bluffs, Iowa Paul had gotten on the various Facebook groups for our brand of RV and they helped him debug the hydraulic issue. Bad solenoid? Nope. Low fluid? Not that either. He got out there with the volt-meter and learned… nothing. Eventually the Facebook brain trust suggested something else, could the grounding be bad? He undid the bolts that attach the hydraulic system to the RV, re-tightened them. Lo and behold it worked again! What happened is that the hydraulic bay is right behind the driver’s side tire. Road spray and debris…

May 28, 2024 – Day 73 Curt Gowdy State Park, Cheyenne Wyoming — Victoria Springs State Park, Anselmo Nebraska We pulled out of Curt Gowdy this morning and were quickly struck by how many windmills there were! Lots of windmills. Now the odd thing is, the heading above says Victoria Spring State Park. When we headed out we had no idea where we would be sleeping. Victoria Springs is the type of park we don’t like — half the park’s sites are reservable and rest are walk-in plus they won’t let you make last minute reservations for the sites that you can reserve. Paul called and left a message asking…

May 27, 2024 — Day 74 Yampa River State Park, Hayden Colorado — Curt Gowdy State Park, Cheyenne Wyoming Today was high altitude day. As such, you don’t get any photos. Let’s just say the drive from Hayden, CO to Walden, CO was really nice. But we were both busy driving the Jeep and RV so no pictures! We did it this way because we were going up and over some big mountains and lightening the RV’s load is wise. To that end we also dumped tanks and carried only a half tank of water. Paul did set a new high score of 9,564 feet. Here’s the elevation and gradient…