Cleveland, Ohio

July 26 2012

Today didn’t go as planned but we’re pretty good at adapting to circumstances. We had planned on getting to Cleveland in time to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Upon checking in at the campground I picked up a brochure and discovered the Hall of Fame closed at 5:30. How is that possible, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame closing in the middle of the afternoon?

Anyhow, we’ve checked on parking for the motorhome across the street from the venue and will stop there on our way out of town tomorrow. Time is slipping away and we don’t have another whole day in Cleveland. It’s hard to believe we’re nearing the end of the trip, when we left early in May it seemed like we had all the time in the world. We are now down to a little over a week before our return to Myrtle Beach.

We didn’t take any pictures today, not much to see on I-80, but I’ve posted some miscellaneous pictures from the trip.

Grainger, Indiana

July 25 2012

The goal for today was to get through Chicago unscathed. I had a route planned that would have taken us thru the western side of the city where I assumed there would be less congestion. At the last minute I made a snap decision when the GPS directed me to a different route. That route of course went straight thru the middle of Chicago. It wasn’t too bad, traffic did get very heavy as we neared center city, but it never stopped. For a time the lanes became very narrow and I had to squeeze the cars too my left so we didn’t play mirror tag with the trucks to my right.

After Chicago I drove east for a ways to get out of the urban environment, we are night camped in a very nice KOA campground in Granger Indiana. (KOA is a franchise, Kampgrounds of America) To our delight there is a vintage RV rally this weekend and several of the restored campers were already here. They are some of the friendliest folks we’ve met on this trip; several invited us in to look at the interiors of their campers. This weekend they will have over 70 old RV’s in the campground for the rally.

Tomorrow we push on to Cleveland and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

AirVenture Day 2

July 24 2012

I returned to the airfield at Oshkosh today, Millie decided to stay home with the girls. It was a long hot day on our feet yesterday and if Airventure hadn’t been on my bucket list for so long, I might have done the same. I left early and arrived at the airfield at 8am and headed straight for the ultralight flying field. It lies at the extreme edge of the property so the ultra lights can operate at the same time as the activities on the main runway.

The highlight of my day was flying; I flew in a light sport version of an ultralight called the M-Squared Breese 2 SS LSA. It is a single surface, high wing, side-by-side, two-place ultralight type aircraft, with a maximum take-off weight of 1320 lbs. The wings are aerodynamic strut braced, with a multiple tube-braced tail. The landing gear is a tri-cycle arrangement with a steerable nose wheel.

Tomorrow we leave here and head south toward Chicago, which we will just pass thru as we skirt around the bottom of Lake Michigan. We will stop for the night east of Chicago and then head for our next destination, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland Ohio.

Airventure

July 23 2012

AirVenture, it’s something I’ve wanted to attend for a long time and it’s more than I ever imagined. It is so all encompassing it’s hard to give a simple description of it. It’s a fly-in with hundreds of small airplanes parked in fields, the owners camping under their wings in tents, it’s an RV campground filled with aviation enthusiast that will be dismantled at the end of the week, its tents, booths, and buildings with venders selling anything to do with aviation. It’s your standard Boat or RV show purple glass cleaner vendor right next to a booth selling multi-million dollar aircraft. Its seminars, hands on work shops, films on anything to with aircraft and flying, there’s an air show every afternoon, there’s aircraft of every size and shape on display. You can ride, for a fee, in several types of helicopter, and many fixed wing airplanes, including the only airworthy B-29 Super Fortress in the world.......surely his must be heaven!

The road to Oshkosh

July 22 2012

Short ride today, only about 110 miles, but the highway detoured us again. Rather than take the long detour for little linear gain, we deviated and drove our own course across the state. We have found it to be very common that highway construction completely closes long sections of road for work that could be done with a simple lane shift.

We are in a nice small campground on a lake in Fremont Wisconsin. We are just a short distance from Oshkosh where AirVenture is held. We plan on going to Oshkosh on Monday and Tuesday, we’re not sure if we will stay longer than that. We still have other things we want to see on the way home.

Sparta, Wisconsin

July 21 2012

Today we crossed the Mississippi River and are officially in the eastern half of the country again. Our last day in the west was another day of driving on Hwy 14 through rural Minnesota. As nice as the countryside is, the many construction detours we had to take today started to wear on us. We happily said hello to Wisconsin and everything got better. The roads got smoother; Minnesota still has the worst roads in the country. The countryside became wooded hills, which was nice after 2 ½ days of looking at corn.

On our drive today we did enjoy several more small towns in Minnesota; one New Ulm was founded by German immigrants. You can see the homeland influence all over town, from the neat residential homes to the German architecture of the downtown buildings. All these small rural towns somehow reaffirm our faith in America; somehow the world out here doesn’t seem as crazy.

As is normal for our travels we usually have no reservations or even a campground picked as a destination at the end of each day. If a check of our discount program books has no match for our area, we just pick an exit that has a camping symbol and go check it out. Today’s search found us on the Fort McCoy Army Base near Sparta, Wisconsin. Seems they’ve changed the rules and the public is now welcome at military base campgrounds. We’re paying a higher rate than active duty or retired military personnel but it’s just for one night.

Springfield, Minnesota

July 20 2012

Today was another day of driving east on Hwy 14, a two lane road that crosses both South Dakota and Minnesota. The country side is wide open wild grassland and cultivated farmland. The further east we got the flatter the land became. At the South Dakota and Minnesota border we passed through the largest wind farm we have ever seen, there were electricity generating wind mills as far as we could see. We’ve passed many wind farms on this trip, but this is the largest we’ve seen, so far.

We passed thru several interesting small towns, one of them was the hometown of Laura Ingles Wilder, author of “Little house on the prairie.” Small town America as I imagine it was in the 40’s and 50’s, that’s the impression I got from the villages. Several have campsites in small town parks; we stopped and had lunch in one, drove thru a second but decided not to stay overnight and settled here in the town park at Springfield Minnesota.

As we were walking around the park we speculated on why the campground was full and everyone but us was from Minnesota. We think the most plausible explanation is these are folks who live out in the country on farms and other solitary locations. They all came camping in town to be around other people, a lot of them were gathered in groups socializing.

Another interesting theme I noticed in the towns we passed today is; if they had a dealership selling vehicles it was more often than not a farm equipment dealer not an auto dealer.

This morning we passed another milestone, we have driven over 8000 miles. We’re sure now that the entire trip will be over 10,000 miles. We originally naively guessed it would be a 6000 to 7000 mile trip.