Press on Regardless
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 attractive farm houses.
Sure we’ve had some recent troubles, an engine misfire and the two rock chips. Oh yeah, we picked up a second rock chip in the windshield today. What are the odds of 2 chips in the windshield in a week? And for all our griping about wanting to be home we know that we have it pretty easy and remind ourselves that we have it pretty good. We’re traveling in a nice RV seeing amazing scenery and experiencing wondrous things. We are definitely having a much better day than this poor trucker.
It’s hard to imagine what they must have felt when forced to pull over. And, what about the late delivery? That’s not a house so at least someone isn’t missing their home. But it is an industrial looking building and that business is missing their building!
We stopped for gas. We like to stop at Flying J stations that have RV fuel lanes. If that’s not available, we scour the route looking for a small town gas station. Sadly, it’s often more expensive that way but small town stations usually have gas pumps parallel to the road and/or the convenience store. If they’re perpendicular to the store it makes it difficult, if not impossible, for us to pull up to the pump for fuel and then make the turn to get out. Sometimes it can be a real challenge but usually we manage to find what we need. Cumberland Farms here in Keene is a good example of a gas station with a perpendicular orientation (bad). This shot shows what parallel pumps looks like (good).
Hmmm, that roof looks pretty close to the canopy so Paul decided to climb the ladder and have a look for himself. Yikes! It looks like they installed new lights and didn’t redo the height sign! The canopy is listed at 13’6″ and we’re 12’10” so we were okay even if the newer parts reduced the clearance. Neither of us had thought to glance up at the height sign before entering. We assumed it would be tall enough because these things are always tall enough. We got really lucky this time. That could have been a very expensive lesson.
Eventually, we made it to Kalona, IA where the population is just 2,600 people. It’s a great example of small-town mid-America. Downtown is absolutely charming in that picture post card way. We’re discovering that lots of municipalities here in the midwest run small campgrounds (like the one we had last night). Sometimes they suggest a small donation and sometimes (like last night and today) they’ll run you $20. So far we’ve had a mix of some awesome ones (Andrews, TX, which we’ve been to twice) and some less awesome (like today). For $20/night you don’t expect the Ritz but, you expect some level of maintenance to be happening. There were used surgical gloves, pop cans and pizza boxes in our fire pit, and next door more of the same plus a little one’s pink flip flop. Ewwww. Grass wasn’t trimmed well and the place felt run down.
The draw with these city parks is they’re usually a safe place to park and they provide at least an electric hookup. At the moment it’s a need and not a want. It’s hot and humid here in America’s heartland. (susan here: we’re living in what amounts to a metal tube that’s more like a hot oven posing as an RV.) We haven’t cracked 90F inside the RV yet but we’ve come close at a humid 89F. For tonight we’ll forage in the fridge for dinner and get ready for tomorrow’s long planned for adventure.
Daily: 268
Total: 6,505
Driving Miles/Day: 224
Overall Miles/Day: 83
mpg: 6.27