Catching Up

After leaving the Land Between the Lakes, we were looking for a place to stop overnight going up the east side of Missouri. We finally decided to keep going to Bowling Green. We stayed at the Cozy C campground there, a nice little family owned campground just outside of town. They had a real nice laundry there, so we decided to stay an extra day and catch up the laundry. We even played a couple of rounds of mini golf there at the campground.

Our next stop was our daughter, Sarah's driveway in Desmoines.  We enjoyed a few days there visiting both of our daughters' families there. As much as we were enjoying our time there, we were anxious to get back to Sioux City. We had planned on staying in Sioux City for two weeks and head on up to Bismarck, ND for a month. After much discussion we have decided to stay here longer and clean out our old house and put it on the market. We now have a 40' steel shipping container next to the new house that we are going to load our stuff into until Rebecca and her family find a new place or decide to buy our new house and stay there. Sorting out and packing up a house and garage with a 36 year accumulation is going to take some time. It is interesting to find a few forgotten "treasures". It will probably be the first part of August before we head out to Bismarck, but we will hopefully be much more relaxed with the decisions having been made and the work done.

We have been fixing a few things at the new house and the well driller finished the new well. It is taking longer than they expected for the water to clear up but the well guy thinks it will clear up this week. I am planning to install a 50 amp rv outlet there so we can park there when we are in town. I am leaning toward getting a macerator pump to pump the rv waste tanks through a small hose vs installing a sewer line across the yard for a drain.

Another Day in the LBL

We did some more back country driving in the LBL today.  Here are a few pictures or the roads that we traveled.  We crossed a lot of creeks today.

We stopped at a few more cemeteries with a lot of old markers.  This one was an 18 year old wife. 

We had been reading about some old furnaces here on the property that processed iron ore into iron before and during the early years of the civil war, and finally spotted one today.

We plan on hitting the road again tomorrow morning and will probably be in Missouri tomorrow night.

Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area

Yesterday we explored part of the Land Between the Lakes, or LBL as it is called here.  The area is about 60 miles long and 10 to 12 miles wide and bounded by two lakes.  There are some paved roads, but since we had the Jeep, we explored several of the back roads and fire roads like the pictures below.

We had packed a lunch, so we enjoyed it in a secluded spot on the lake shore.

There were several old cemeteries scattered throughout the area and we stopped at several of them. The old homemade headstones were very interesting, such as this one that says "murdered". Makes you want to know the rest of the story.

We stopped at this little spring for a bit.

All in all we put a lot of offroad miles on the Jeep and it needed a bath.

Today is Mother's Day, so we are resting at the campground. Janice got a flower and a prayer book at Mass this morning and we had lunch at a barbeque place here in town.

They are predicting thunderstorms for tonight and tomorrow, so we have extended our stay here until Tuesday.

Catching Up on Pictures

We arrived in Aurora, KY today. We plan to be here until Monday. We are next to the Land Between the Lakes region where we hope to do a little sight seeing during the next few days. I have a little time this afternoon to catch up on posting some pictures. The first one is a picture of the work truck that I drove most days at Ordway.  It was an old military surplus Dodge 4wd that worked well. Behind it is the new maintenance building that was just being completed when we left.

This is the old maintenance building that we started out at most days.

On the property was a old family cemetary that is being maintained by Ordway.

One of the other volunteers there became a good friend of ours. She was a very interesting lady with a big heart. The first two things that you would find out about her was that she was from Cuba and loved plants. We miss her smile and hope to run into her again.

Her two dogs, Molly and Phoebe would always run to greet us and would come over occasionally and come in for a treat.

The road from Florida to Georgia was surrounded with beautiful yellow and purple flowers for miles.

The campground in Albany, GA had an interesting bush with blooms that looked like a brush.

There were a few feathered friends across the road from our camp site.

As soon as Janice started feeding them, the crowd increased!

This one had quite a fancy top knot!

I can't remember if I have posted a picture of the Jeep after we got the rack mounted on it or not, but here it is.

As usual, when we got to Georgia, Mom's yard was beautiful!

 And the creek was peaceful.

Phil and Tristan found a snake in the back yard.

Rosie was determined to bite Mom's ear!

It was good to visit with all of the family again.

As usual, our time seemed too short there, but it was time to move on. The first night on the road we were in Gadsden, AL at the Noccalula Falls campground.  The falls are still beautiful.

And downstream is peaceful.

We suspected that we had a mouse in the motorhome and so we put down some sticky traps. Someone forgot about them and stepped in one this morning. This of course caused much laughter and almost no sympathy from my bride and she had to take pictures and make sure that it was included in the blog.