Wandering Westward

It dawned on us sometime this week that most people load up their camper and get ready to hit the road from the comfort and convenience of their own home, an element of all this that somehow escaped us when we decided to do it “entre maisons,” which is to say, our home base was an RV park about 45 minutes from our storage bin. Not ideal. Mike has a few words to say about that, so I’ll leave further discussion to him in the next post.

For the time being, I’ll say it took far longer than we expected. But then we realized, we have no schedule, so we tried to relax and take our time. So we wound up staying at the Indian Springs RV park on State Line Road for most of a week. Alice’s organizational idea for the van worked very well—things are really working well there. We have shifted a few things to the camper for travel to keep the loads even, so it’s a work in progress, but it’s a plan that works, and that’s what counts.

An organized van

Just when we had everything ready to go, the rains came. And Mike did not want to start out in a deluge, so we had a short break at the Lawrenceburg casino just down the road. An interesting place. The faux Art Deco décor is totally over the top, but it is weird to see such a fancy place full of what look to me like video games. And I didn’t spot James Bond or any Bond girls anywhere in the place. I’ve had better food by far in tribal casinos; nobody ever went to the Hollywood for the cuisine, I’m guessing. But it was warm and dry and we even worked around the fact that you had to run the water for half an hour (not exaggerating) before it got hot.

On Thursday, it was overcast but not raining, so we moved on. We’re heading for Kentucky’s Land Between the Lakes for a few days to continue working on the camper setup. If the sun comes out and the wind dies down, we may even get to open the awning. Following our friend Ray Frank’s advice, the Rule of Twos: we try not to go more than 200 miles a day, drive no more than two hours at one stretch, and with luck stay at least two days in one place. We broke that rule when it was obvious we wouldn’t make Land Between the Lakes in one day (we try to stay on backroads, some U.S. routes but we avoid interstates). We stopped for one night at Pennyrile State Park about an hour shy of Land Between the Lakes. A lovely place, with a nice lake, and we woke up to blue skies and sunshine. One note: we are on Central Standard Time, probably for the next couple of months.

The lake at Pennyrile State Park in Kentucky

We are on our way to the Land Between the Lakes, and hope to find a nice government campsite with electric—they do exist. Then we’ll figure out the water system, which we have been kind of avoiding so far. And I’m determined to open that awning and put out our comfortable chairs for a change.

Look for the next installment from Mike, “How Not to Prep a New Camper for a Long Trip.”

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