September 14 Arrival in Missouri, well Illinois

The day started off great and at the end went downhill fast. We didn’t leave as early as we would have liked, it was about 8:40. Bill had to air up 2 of the truck tires. The drive was longer than yesterday. We seemed to stop more than we planned, twice for fuel, once for lunch, once to check a tire and one to just use the bathroom.

They travel better than the kids ever did!

At first the landscape was totally flat with acres and acres of mostly cotton, but a lot of wheat also. The it changed to rolling hills with small towns dotted along. Still a lot of farmland and we saw harvesting of the cotton and wheat. I wanted to stop and get a picture of me picking cotton but it’s not so easy to do in the RV.

We still made it to Caholia, IL, which is just across the Mississippi from St Louis at 4:00. Traffic picked up as we approached St. Louis and drivers were ignoring my signal to change lanes, then Bill blocked the side mirror as I was trying to change lanes and I had to swerve back and we had “words”, then the Garmin said to make a right into the RV park, then changed it’s mind to a left and I couldn’t get over and once I did I almost overshot the entrance and then had my rear stuck out in traffic and ticked off everyone behind me til I got across. THEN, once we got checked into the park Bill spotted a tear on the edge of our roof, which we have no idea how it happened, AND there’s no cable here so we decided to try the Direct TV for 3 nights and of course, we could not get a signal. Asked a neighbor and he came over and tried and after over an hour we gave up, AND the park has on it’s website that it has WIFI but they no longer do. And yes, now I’m in a mood! And it’s not a good one.

At 7 I finally heated up the meatloaf, steamed the broccoli and micro’d an acorn squash for dinner. There wasn’t a lot of conversation going on. We took Xena for a walk around the park and it is really nice out. It’s a pretty large park and quite a few of basically full time tenants. They have lots of “stuff” accumulated around their campers and have a junky look going. The campground is the Cahokia RV Parque and I think it’s overpriced for just having water, electric and sewer, but it is super convenient to get into St Louis and that is kinda important.

After our walk we tried to sit out but the mosquitoes were trying to carry us off. Next time we’ll have to put out several of the bug candles for a while before we attempt sitting out. We went over our list of places to visit while we’re here and after we make a stop at an RV place tomorrow to get a patch for the roof, we’ll try to systematically make some of our stops. Tomorrow night we have tickets to see the Cardinals play so will come home and feed the pets before going to the game. We just had our Hubig pies, which has improved my mood drastically.