The Wrong Way Cezannes

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 the engine. We couldn’t book anything, campsite or hotel room, because we didn’t know where we would be or if we’d even have the RV. (susan here: note to self, make sure you have at least an overnight bag of some kind on board so that if you have to go to a hotel you don’t look like a hobo dragging your belongings in using trash or grocery bags.)

The garage was huge. And that’s only about a third of the bulding!

They had this cool old firetruck in there, and a long dump body up on the lift.

They were too busy to do a “bring it in the bay and we’ll look at it” checkup. Paul had cleared the engine codes and the tech didn’t find any new error codes from the drive over to the garage. Basically, the technician found nothing wrong. Plus, it appeared to have run fine on the half hour ride over there. He said we could come back in a few days but, frankly, he wasn’t sure what he could do without error codes or something obviously wrong. Since we have a good towing service plan we all agreed that pressing on was probably okay to do.

We found a “first come/first served” city campground in Papillon, Nebraska. Even better it was just $20 and that included electricity which we were thankful for since it was a very humid day! We grabbed a site and set up.

Then we headed out for lunch at Shirley’s Diner in Omaha, NE. The food was excellent and the portions were huge! We had enough leftover for another meal.

Later that evening Susan spotted a really cool cloudy sky.

Since Steamboat Springs, CO we both realized that this trip had become too long. We were done and wanted to be home. Plus we just added 2 days to an already too long trip because of stupid RV tricks. Worse, we still had about 1400 miles between us and home and that was kind of overwhelming. For sure, we have a lot of fun adventuring but there’s an awful lot of just grinding it out when a trip involves this much time and mileage. It’s not a complaint merely an observation. We both know how fortunate we are to be able to do this. All of that is to say: We could have caught up on the blogs but we didn’t. Instead we chose to surf the internet, watch some TV, play some games and not do anything else. Sometimes you need to do nothing and recharge (mental, physical or both). Today was that day. Besides, the next day was a travel day that would bring us to a place with a really cool, nerdy attraction. Something to look forward to!

Daily: 21

Total: 6,237

Driving Miles/Day: 223

Overall Miles/Day: 81

Life Bird: 1 (Brown Thrasher)