Day 35: Thursday 29-Jul-1999
From: Kingdom City, Missouri
To: Zanesville, Ohio
Distance: 570 mi (912 km)
Alarm on 4:00 am, but we did not get up until 4:30. The one hour time difference from Utah made its mark. Outside and inside temperature was the same (75F/24C) but the humidity was not the same! It was very sticky already at 5 in the morning. The Airstream and the truck are now looking terribly dirty. We still have red dust from Monument Valley on the truck. More importantly, both are now covered with a film of white dust. They have had a terrible dry spell here. The same morning procedure as usual: on the road by 5:30am. We've now been on vacation for five weeks.
It is curious how disoriented one can become in rapidly moving traffic in an unfamiliar city. Once again the GPS came handy as we drove through St Louis; we were able to avoid downtown traffic. It is really neat to use it with the laptop, as we can zoom in an even seen the names of local streets we are driving by; a green arrow shows our truck as it is moving along the road. It is easy to see Interstate exists on the map and when, perhaps, we ought to be making lane changes in anticipation of exits or forks.
About 200 miles from our departure this morning, a car drove up alongside our truck, holding up a note in their window: YOUR TV ANTENNA IS UP! Oh, great. We thanked them and took the next exit which happened to be a rest area. Nothing appeared wrong and we wound it down. We had thankfully not had any serious wind so driving with it would have been no worse than being hit by 80-100mph gusts of wind, which it should support, right :-) We notice that we have returned to serious snow country, as we've now started to see rusty cars again. You hardly see that in Arizona or southern Utah.
It looked hot outside and the radio reported that a major heat wave had already taken some 60+ lives. People thought we were crazy to go down to Arizona and Utah in the summer, but the fact is that we have not needed to use the air conditioning until we started our return back! Good-bye dry 65F (18C) nights. If it continues like this we have to sleep in our trailer even after we've parked it in our driveway.. now that would be a diary :-)
We're now on route to visit the Longaberger basket factory outside of Dresden, Ohio. We picked a campsite nearby, a KOA campground in Zanesville, along I70. Lillemor drove here from the Missouri border (about 160 miles/256 km). Turns out to be a nice campground, with a pond, plenty of space for the kids and a fairly large pool. We scraped the rear 2x2 receiver used for the bike rack as we parked it. We've really got to get rid of it. We wanted to do it before leaving, but there was just not enough time. Fortunately we scraped it on gravel and not asphalt. We plan to make the basket visit tomorrow morning, before heading onward East.
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| Parked at Zanesville KOA, about 50 miles (80km) east of
Columbus, Ohio. |
It did not take long after we parked that Isabella went into the mud surrounding the pond. There is just so much to see bass, grass carp, frogs and sunfish. She cleaned her off and we all took a dip in their swimming pool. It was very nice. We then returned back to the trailer. Shortly after Isabella had gotten dressed she wanted to go out again. She came back 30 minutes later -- dirty again! This time she had caught a very large frog and a very small one. The frog is actually very large. He has now moved into his new home: Isabella's bug-box under the trailer.