Skip to main content

Scamping: Week One

 We practiced driving and turning the van + Scamp in a movie theatre parking lot down the street from where we were staying, then had some soup and walked across the street to the A-Pine restaurant for some postprandial pie. I had bumbleberry, Mike had strawberry rhubarb—and they were DELICIOUS.

The Place the Music Died

Then next day we hit the road—mostly back roads—from Pequot Lakes south to get the rest of our stuff to outfit the camper from our storage bin in Cincinnati. It was kind of slow going as we learned how to negotiate with the trailer and how the camper worked. We skirted Minneapolis—no big cities on this shakedown run—and made it to Iowa the first night out. We stayed in the Clear Lake, Iowa, area, which is kind of famous. We passed by a historic marker for the Surf Club in Clear Lake (the name gave me a laugh, since I almost remember the Surf Club at Western Bowl, and this seemed like a bigger version of that place). Anyway, the Iowa Surf Club was where Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens had just finished a Winter Dance Party show before they boarded the plane, just after midnight on February 3, 1959. The Day the Music Died. We passed by the Mason City airport the next day. And we discovered that they still have a Winter Dance Party every year at the beginning of February.

On through Illinois, where we passed through Galesburg, home of beloved American poet Carl Sandburg, and stopped in Peoria for the evening. We had a tasty dinner at a BBQ restaurant and saw a beautiful prairie sunrise when we got up the next day. And a man driving by stopped and came back to ask what the heck that camper was—he wants one!

What Does This Switch Do?

In Indiana, we stopped at Summit Lakes State Park east of Indianapolis to learn more about how the camper setup works. So many switches, niches, and glitches! (No, really just a few glitches; we are getting the hang of things.) We stayed for two nights, and it was unseasonably warm, which was nice. But man, it was REALLY windy. We could tell we were driving into the wind for the past two or three days—it definitely affected our gas mileage.

Enjoying our first meal prepared in the camper

A Quick Visit to the Tristate

When we got to the Cincinnati metropolitan area on Wednesday, we chose a place to stay somewhat out of the metropolitan area, on the Ohio/Indiana border, but still fairly convenient to get to our storage bin. We’ve spent the past few days putting stuff into storage and taking other stuff out, and generally figuring out how little we can take with us and still be comfortable. It’s quite a challenge, but we’re getting there. We also both met up with friends one day (separately, it was good to have a little distance for half a day). Together, we had dinner with our daughter Alice and her husband Rory one night, waited on a rainy night for trick-or-treaters (none showed up at the camper, so we went to the Cleves Skyline where at least the teen staff were wearing costumes), and then had dinner with my sister Amy, brother-in-law Rob, and nephew Erich the next day, at Carriage House Farm, which isn’t far from where we were staying. We were pleasantly surprised to run into our friend Lenny Hall there, and we also listened to a talented young musician while we ate.

On Saturday, Mike mounted the new bike rack we got for the back of the camper, so we can now take the bikes out of the back of the van and the camper, where they have been traveling for a week, since we couldn't use our old bike rack on the back of the van when we pull the trailer. 

Alice came to see the camper and had a pretty great idea about how to organize the back of the van so we could take a little more of what we wanted—like Mike’s guitar and Julie’s quilting—by setting things up so there weren’t boxes everywhere and we could actually access everything. I think this means we can even bring our bread machine! (We’ll see.) We have a bit more organizing to do and more learning how cold it can get and still let us be comfortable (fortunately we are in for another warming spell, which is good). Then we are going to be on the road again, heading south to even warmer climes, we hope.

Fitting everything into the back of the van


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Waterways and Wetlands of Western Ohio

  Though we are still not technically on the road for awhile, it’s spring in the Midwest and we are occasionally getting out to see some sites nearby. Last week we had a sunny, warm day that followed many days of rain, so we decided to head out somewhere to hike where there were boardwalks—or at least solid rock paths. We started at Charleston Falls, near Tipp City. The preserve was far more crowded than usual; the warm weather after a long winter apparently brought out the crowds, especially homeschooled kids and their families. We took the path less traveled back through prairie meadows (only slightly mushy) to the top of the falls, then wandered down the stone paths to the bottom of the falls. There was water going over the falls, though not a lot. The falls are fed by small underground springs several miles to the east, and the stream creating the falls plummets almost 40' as it flows to the Great Miami River, one mile to the west.  Charleston Falls Preserve in western O...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Great Platte River Road . . . and Big Rocks

The North Platte River runs the entire length of Nebraska, almost right through the center of the state. It’s a braided stream, a river or stream with many intertwined channels separated by islands or sandbars, so it looks somewhat like the strands of a braid. The folks heading west followed the main channel of the river, where there was grass for the oxen and mules, water for everyone, and fairly flat going. The government built Fort Kearny along the North Platte fairly early—1848, my guidebook tells me—to help protect the travelers along the Oregon and California Trails. Fun fact, both of those were the same trail until far western Wyoming, and they were on the south side of the river. When the Mormons started heading west to Salt Lake City, they walked with handcarts along a trail on the north side of the river, a route that was called the Mormon Trail, and met up with the other two trails around what’s now the border of Nebraska and Wyoming. North Platte River in Nebraska The tow...
Post a Comment
Read more

Living with the Chill, Waiting for the Warm Up

 The Coastal Bend area of the Texas Coast is known as a birder’s paradise, and we have seen some pretty cool specimens, up close, including roseate spoonbills and brown pelicans and willets. This heron believes that he owns the wharf down at the harbor park in Port Aransas. He clearly is accustomed to posing for photos. Harry the Heron surveys his domain There’s also a tower to climb at the harbor park, giving you a good view of the waterway called Aransas Pass, where the ferry crosses to the mainland, and some of the huge ships that go through the pass. We often see dolphins in the water up there, but they are very tricky to photograph. The circle on the photo below shows a dolphin fin just popping up out of the water. This one stayed for quite awhile until we left to get a seafood dinner at Grumbles on the other side of the harbor. After dinner we drove around to the University of Texas maritime research facility and then past that, to the beach road which is amazingly well maint...
1 comment
Read more