The furniture got moved! The van got its oil changed! All our appointments concluded with generally good news! And finally, in mid-April, we headed back out for more adventures.
We started with a short trip to Letart Falls, Ohio, near
Pomeroy, on the river, to visit our friends Frank and Anne. We hadn’t seen them
for a couple of years, and Frank is grumpily recuperating from recent hip
surgery, but that didn’t stop him from wandering around the yard showing us his
seed starter mini-greenhouse, which is very cool. He was concerned about some
Korean melons sprouting, but we had warm weather while we were there, so they
should be sprouting soon.
Frank’s little seed starter greenhouse
We had a nice two-day visit with them, camping in their side
yard and wandering around Gallipolis and some other nearby towns where Frank
had lived when he was growing up. We also ate lunch at Remo’s Italian Hot Dogs
in Gallipolis, and the hot dogs were delicious. Then we added yet another state
to our travels this year when we crossed the Ohio River at Middleport and had
dinner one night at a great Mexican restaurant in West Virginia.
Remo’s Italian Hot Dogs in Gallipolis
We dealt with the furniture moving in between the trip to Letart Falls and heading west on our major spring journey. We watched the moving men play Tetris with our furniture in the morning, then Alice helped us empty our smallest storage unit and put the stuff in with the furniture in the biggest unit. We got it done, but a friend of ours quipped that the end result looks like what Howard Carter saw when opening King Tut’s tomb—without the gold.
We were very, very tired when we were finished, but hot
showers and a good night’s sleep were all we needed, surprisingly, to get on
the road. It was noon when we headed west on U.S. 50, but we were on the way! We
had decided we wouldn’t go far and planned to stay at the Indiana state park in
Versailles. But it was only 25 minutes away, so we kept going and found a
lovely (though rather expensive) state park in Mitchell, Indiana, called Spring
Mill. Indiana raised the prices for both park entry and camping, but they did
give us a “spring discount,” so it was comparable to the most expensive places
we’ve camped so far.
It was a lovely park, and it was a beautiful and warm
evening, with plenty of stars. While we were there, we learned that Mitchell
was the birthplace and childhood home of the astronaut Gus Grissom, who died in
the Apollo 1 fire (on the ground). He was also the designer of the Mercury
capsule, which the other astronauts called the Gusmobile. One of the Mercury
capsules is in the small museum at the entrance to the park that pays tribute
to Grissom. I took a terrible photo of the capsule, with the windows reflected
in the glass.
Gus Grissom’s Mercury capsule is in Mitchell, IN
Two other astronauts were born and raised nearby, I
learned—I decided they either had a really good science teacher or a Boy Scout
troop that piqued their interest in flying. Turns out there was a scout troop,
and Grissom belonged to it. He also flunked Latin in 9th grade, but he did well
in science, so he knew which way his career was headed, I suppose.
On through Illinois, where we started following some
segments of the Trail of Tears, the forced march of Cherokee and Choctaw to
lands set aside for them in Oklahoma (much of which were taken from them
later). We were not purposely following the Trail of Tears route, but we did
see signs for the route in Missouri and Arkansas, too, where the Osages and
other tribes were added to the march.
We’re always interested in the history
of the routes we are traveling
We camped at a Forest Service campground in the Shawnee
National Forest at the very bottom of Illinois, where the state boundary is all
wiggly from the Ohio River. It was a small campground, with only two other
sites occupied, and was located above a hillside of huge boulders of gneiss,
which is called the Garden of the Gods by the Forest Service (not to be
confused with the Garden of the Gods, large redstone formations, in Colorado).
Some of the rocks called the Garden of the
Gods on the hillside below our campsite
We are in traveling mode, trying to stay ahead of rain and
in places that are warm. We’ve had pretty good weather so far, especially in
Arkansas, where we camped at a couple of state parks, one called Crowley’s
Ridge not far from the eastern border of the state, and one called Lake
Dardenelle in the western part of the state. They were very different;
Crowley’s Ridge was small and quiet; we met a fellow named James who came over
and chatted with us while Mike played his guitar. James wanted to hear Little Feat’s
“Willin’” and Mike was willin’ to give it a try. James was an interesting guy.
He rode a motorcycle, lived in a tent so he doesn’t count himself homeless. A
nice guy, too; he went right over to help another camper change a flat tire. He
told us he was old, but he was the same age as me, so he couldn’t have been
right about that.
Lake Dardanelle State Park was big and busy (the lake, an
impoundment of the Arkansas River, is also quite big). It was nice weather—and
Friday evening—when we were there, so the campground was full and fairly noisy.
We saw a sign on the entrance road marking it as an Arkansas
Nuclear One Evacuation Route, and from the park, we saw the nuclear plant that
is Arkansas One across the lake. Fortunately we didn’t need to find out where
the evacuation route would take us.
across the lake from our campsite
Mike found a BBQ joint near the campground so we went out to
eat, and we had delicious brisket and the best damn baked beans I had ever
eaten. Fat Daddy’s BBQ in Russellville, Arkansas, is not to be missed.
The next day we crossed the Oklahoma border, and that’s a wide state to cross. We stopped in Seminole, in the Muskogee (Cree) nation, for the evening and we had a really delicious catfish dinner, with fried okra on the side, my favorite. I have a poster that says “Okra, the People’s Vegetable.” It’s the best. We’ll cook in the camper the next few evenings to make up for the extravagance of barbeque and catfish.
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