October 5, 2023 – Day 7 We got up in the morning and had an egg, ham, spinach and cheddar scramble with toast and even did a load of laundry. If you recall from the previous trip with the trailer finding good laundry machines proved challenging. Oh, you could find machines, but you didn’t know they were bad until it was too late. When we bought Clifford we were happy to see that we had onboard laundry, slightly disappointed that we need to be stationary to use and plan for it but it’s still a heck of a lot better having laundry on board as opposed to seeking it out.…

October 4, 2023 – Day 6 We had planned an easy day. It would just be a short drive to Ava, MO for a visit with some of Susan’s relatives that she hadn’t seen in decades. But first we had repairs to make. A couple days ago, the wooden trim around the bedroom slider pulled away driving on that nightmare called I-70W. Paul was pretty sure it would be an easy fix. That long wood screw seemed to be installed incorrectly. All we had to do (famous last words) was pry off a decorative end cap to get at the screw head and reposition it above. Sadly, we hadn’t brought…

October 3, 2023 – Day 5 Today was the day we were going to do things! We planned on going into St. Louis, get tickets to ride to the top of the Arch, visit the museum and then off to the St. Louis Chess Club Museum. (paul here: Yeah, chess museum/hall of fame. Fight me.) It turns out you can get to the top of the Arch if you can advance purchase tickets. Except at 9AM on a Tuesday in October it was already sold out. We’re past summer vacations and it’s a Tuesday. In October. Huh? Remember the Johnson Space Center? We see a pattern here. Susan found Plan…

October 2, 2023 – Day 4 The morning was difficult. We were beat up from yesterday. Paul made some morning tea, forgetting to put water in the electric kettle, which triggered its self shutdown mode. Then he put the tea in the microwave, since the kettle needed to cool, and, seeing the numbers 0 on the display set the clock to 12:00 and put his tea in. He realized this about 6 minutes later when he realized he had no tea. Of course bag exploded and the tea was everywhere. At this point we realized that we were beat up from yesterday. No, we wouldn’t go into St. Louis to…

October 1, 2023 – Day 3 We’re sure there are better ways to wake up than sunrises with alpacas. We’re also sure that list isn’t very long. They look so hungry, let’s feed them! Then we headed to a well anticipated rest at the Dr. Edmund Babler State Park in Missouri. It would be our third day of about 400 miles. Easy, right? Nope. I-70 was punishing, brutal concrete or sometimes tar surface unevenly patched with whatever they could find, be it concrete or tar. We felt like we had been flogged nearly to death. It was relentless heaves and pot holes. Susan lasted about 60 miles and wanted out.…

September 30, 2023 – Day 2 We covered last night’s truck stop report in the previous entry. That’s because Paul was typing while Susan did the first shift driving. Driving was super easy. The flat NY state yielded to the gentle hills of PA and then into the oddity that is Ohio. The highways here are perfect, the coach very few creaks or crashes as we glided nearly silent down the smooth asphalt highway. But…the highways. Parts of it are some of the worst we’ve seen. It was as if Ohio saw a frost heave sign and said, “Here. Hold my beer.” We both counted and we have all our…

September 29, 2023 – Day 1 Sorry about the click bait title. We’ll explain later, but it’s a title so it has to be at the top. Yes we’re doing it all over again and driving back to Phoenix for the second time this year! It’s not to escape fall which we’re going to miss, but for the annular eclipse and a bonus visit with Anastasia (Paul’s daughter) and John (our future son-in-law) who live in Phoenix. We sold the trailer from the last trip. We like road tripping, we loved the trailer, but that was just too small for these epic journeys. So we bought this RV and it…