getting into my brother’s driveway

Now that is a silly name for a post. Anyway, some have asked, so here it is.

Coming off of the highway I turn onto his street and than have to make a left turn into the bank entrance. This shows the bank entrance.

Than I have to back out, going the opposite way and back down a residential street for about 3/8 mile

Than make a sharp left (or right depending on which way your head is turned) turn into his driveway, avoiding the mailbox and tree

If I am lucky I can do this in two or three tries.

After all this I pull off the driveway into the yard. They just paved the driveway last year and where the driveway meets the concrete apron of the garage they installed a drain to collect all of the water that comes down the driveway from rain and snow. I put the electric cord into this channel to protect it. Last year I added a 30 amp plug outside.

Nothin’ to it, but to do it……..

See ya

Jim

Tunica to South Bend, Indiana

YES!!!! We are finally back home.

Linda and I both grew up in the South Bend Indiana/Niles Michigan area and after a year we are back. We left Tunica yesterday after saying Good by to Leroy and Rose

We always enjoy being with them and are looking forward to seeing them again later this summer…..of course it will have to be at a casino, as Leroy is a big time gambler.

There was lots of water in the fields and streams and rivers and I am sure that the farmers have lost some of their crops already.

Yesterday I had a hard time driving. I stayed up late on Monday and had way to may “jack on the rocks” and beers at the casino. So after only about 270 miles we had to stop for the night as I was afraid that my lack of concentration on the road would cause problems. So today we had to do about 340 miles. When we finally hooked up with interstate 80 in Illinois, I gave out a great big “yehhhhhhhhhhh”

I was back in my element. Lots of traffic and trucks. OH BOY is it exciting to be going down the interstate with trucks everywhere…..I love it!!!!

And they are moving along at 65-70mph, which makes it even more exciting……..o.k.  I am a little strange there……5 lanes of traffic and two, and sometimes three of them are trucks.

The downside is that when we got on the Indiana toll road, the  place  where we normally dump our holding tanks was closed…That means we have to go to a campground about 10 miles from my brother’s driveway to dump before we head back to Illinois, and coming back to Indiana we have to stop at the campground again before we come to my brothers.

Speaking of which, here a couple of pictures of my brother, sister in law Peg and nephew Randall.

Peg does not like the flash of the camera, but I thought that that picture of my brother was better….sorry Peg.

Will Post a picture of us in my brothers yard later. In order to get into my brother’s driveway I have to come off of the highway, turn into the driveway at the Bank on the corner, than back out of the driveway to turn the rig around and than back about a quarter mile down a residential street and make a 90 degree turn into his driveway. We will be here until Memorial day, than head to Woodstock Illinois to see our son, daughter in law and two grandsons.

Have a great day

and……………you do know that we love you all.

Jim and LInda

Hollywood casino, Robinsonville, MS

Hi

How are ya’ today?

Coming here from Arkansas, we came across the Mississippi river. We came across the old bridge which is narrow and, well, old. They are building a new 4 lane stayed cable bridge down river. It is always fun to cross over bridges, but some of them, like this one tend to pucker up your butt cheeks as the lanes are very narrow. Luckily we did not meet a semi or rv coming from the other way.

Linda managed to get a couple of pictures of the new bridge between the girders of the old one.

We have enjoyed our time here with old friends Rose and Leroy. The last time that we saw them was about a year ago. We went to the Escapee rally in Sedalia, Missouri with them and it ended up as a mud hole….we both had to get towed out. Leroy loves to gamble and was kind enough to get our rv stay comped for us. He was also very lucky Saturday night. He won $5000 on a dollar slot machine!!!!

Gambling wise, I have had an up and down stay. One day I was up $180 and than lost most of it the next day. Late Saturday night I regained most of what I had lost, and than Yesterday I lost most of it back again.  Tonight is my last time to get ahead. (you have to think positive!!) We were going to leave on Wednesday, but Linda is getting antsy to see family, so we are leaving tomorrow.

We had a rain storm again yesterday and about dark I looked out and the sky was a strange shade of yellow/orange. Got some pictures out of the window thru the rain drops…

It is about 640 miles back to South Bend, so we will make a stop tomorrow afternoon about half way.  It has been a year since we have see family and are both looking forward to see them again.

 

Have a great day

love to all of ya

Jim and Linda

El Dorado, Arkansas

Hey, we are out of there!!!

Spending the night in El Dorado and on to Tunica, Mississippi tomorrow to meet up with our friends Rose and Leroy.

Leroy was very kind to check with his casino host and got us comped (free) the time we are at the campground...until the 19th. Thank you so very much Leroy. But our name will be Rose while we are there.

After yesterday we were anxious to leave Texoma lake. But we will miss it. It is a very very nice campground and we will be going back again. But NOT during tornado season!!!!

Today was very windy with winds mostly from the south.....and of course we were going east...so we got beat around by the wind all day. Tomorrow is supposed to be good, with no rain....but rain Thursday thru Sunday in Tunica (30-40% chance).
Saturday is give away day at the Hollywood casino and I (Jim) will spend the day with Leroy and Rose hoping for a chance to win.
Roads today were very bumpy, rough, shitty....well you get the idea. And it was not all the wind.

Thank you for those who responded to the blog and to Linda's mom Maggie and my brother Tom who kept calling us to check up on us.....they both follow the blog and must look at the weather, because at times they knew more than we did....even with our emergency weather radio!!!
good night to ya

Jim and Linda
(sorry, no pictures today....the scenery was boring and way to midwestern)

As close as we want to ever be

When I wrote about the wind yesterday, little did we know that it would get a lot worse.

A couple of hours after I posted the blog the wind started to get stronger, and stronger. We finally put the slides in and Linda got out the emergency weather radio. It was going off like 4th of July fireworks. We kept checking the road atlas to see which counties and cities were being named off. And the tornado’s kept getting closer.

We finally got the dogs and phones and a few other things and got in the truck and drove about a quarter mile across the road to the bathrooms, which are supposed to be tornado shelters. Everyone else in our part of the park did the same thing. The wind had been blowing at a steady 40mph and by the time we left the trailer it was up 60mph. Linda could hardly get her door closed.

She took the dogs into the shelter and I stood outside. If a tornado was going to hit us, I wanted to see it. The wind all of a sudden stopped. And it got calm. Than the wind started from the other direction. It was coming from the south all day and finally turned from the north. Several of us were standing outside now watching the sky. We could see the clouds, which were very dark, moving in both directions and it looked like they were going to hook up and start rotating. But after a few scary minutes it seemed like things settled down.

We all left and noticed that two trees were down!!!

The motorhome parked right on the lake has a large boat, I would guess about 18 foot fiberglass on a trailer. I was sitting parallel to the motorhome when we left and now it is sitting back about 10 foot and turned 90 degrees from where it was.

We sat in the truck for quite a while listening to the NOAA emergency weather. Finally after it got too dark to see anything we went back into the trailer. The weather radio kept going off until about 11pm when we finally turned it off and opened up the bedroom slide and went to sleep…..

The closest that we heard about a touchdown was in Pottsboro, TX.

http://maps.google.com/maps/mm?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=33.813099,-96.584587&spn=0.165446,0.362206&z=12

This link will show you how close we are to Pottsboro.

Thank God for keeping us safe.

Love to all of you dear friends

Jim and Linda

Heading East from Denison, Texas

Tomorrow morning we will start off again, heading east to El Dorado Arkansas which is about half way to Tunica, MS. Did laundry today and got mail. Ate lunch at Mexican restaurant that was voted best in Denison two years running according to their sign…….we would not even put it in our top 50.

When we were heading back to the campground I asked Linda to take a couple of pictures of us going over the dam. On one side you can see the lake, on the other trees and the river. The road it up about 50 ft. above the lake.

The wind was really blowing across the lake when we got home. As you can see from the white caps on the water.

I took a couple pictures of the trees to try and get a feeling of the wind, but without hearing it blowing they are not nearly as impressive.

Not much of an update….but it’s all I got for ya.

We will see some of you in just over a week.

love to all

Jim and Linda

Denison, TX, or there ‘bouts

Let me see……how can I start this one……oh, I know,   WIND

Well today because it was so hot (91f) we called it a “breeze” even thou the gusts were over 25mph….hmmmmmm

We had all of the windows open and it was quite nice with the “breeze” blowing thru.

When we checked in yesterday the park host said that there was another COE park across the dam in Oklahoma that was just opened this April 1st. Paved sites with water, 50amp electric,  sewer and covered picnic table….all with lake views…….sounds great so we moved over this morning.

Got the trailer washed, truck washed, interior cleaned….and took a second shower for the day. You would not believe all of the bugs on the front of the trailer, mirrors, windshield and truck….sure not used to that anymore after all these months in the desert.

 

This is our site which is really big, all of that asphalt is our site also. Except for the road which I am standing on.

 

You can see the dam on the other side of the lake

this one was taken from inside thru the back window….that is not the sun or moon, but the camera flash.

Hopefully these folks will use the boat this weekend…

We have sent for our mail so will be here thru Monday. Maybe Tuesday.

Looked at Hollywood casino Tunica’s website. If we get there Wednesday we can get the senior breakfast buffet Thursday morning  for .55 cents…and they do have a good breakfast buffet.

Have a great day.

love to ya

Jim and Linda

Denison, TX

HI

Ater 435 miles we are finally at the COE (Corp of Engineers) park in Denison TX, It was a stressful day driving. We had a very strong, mostly cross, wind today. Plus Texas roads are pretty shitty!!! Linda finally had to take a couple of ginger pills and we had to give Walker some Pepto Bismal.

We went from about 4400 foot to about 1100 foot but it was very gradual. Fuel mileage went from 12.7 to 10.4 with the wind and all of the hills.

We will spend one night here and than check out the other corp parks here…..the water is quite a ways from our site but we do have a good satellite signal which is important to me (Jim).

I had to have a large vodka and two beers to settle down and I wanted to quit about 150 miles ago. We have never driven anywhere where there are so few campgrounds. We did not see one, that is 1, campground on almost 400 miles of the trip…..

We are north of Denison TX on Lake Texoma, which is a very large lake (dam) (reservoir)…..we are only about 60-70 miles north of Dallas, TX. We have done the Kennedy museum several years ago and I will check the internet for other interesting things in the area.

Here are a few pictures of our trip across….mostly boring.

The last picture is leaving Albuquerque with rain in the mountains.

Two of the pictures show the wild flowers on the road.

Clovis update

I forgot to tell you.
The campground here is Clovis is one of the most perfect campgrounds we have ever stayed at!!!
The BNSF railroad double track main line is about 150 yards behind us.
The highway is about 100 feet in front of us. With lots of truck traffic.
Now how perfect is that!!!!

And it is warm enough that we will leave the windows open tonight......wow

Clovis, NM

Just a short update today.
After many, many changes in elevation , we went from 5400ft to 4900ft to 7000ft with lots of up and down, with the downs finally winning at Clovis where we are at about 4400ft. It was a short day with only 260 miles.
After we got here Linda says we should be in the COE park on Thursday in order to get a site. That is about 450 miles from here. If we had thought about that earlier we could have gone a little further down the road. Oh well.
We will get most of the way tomorrow, staying just south of Denison TX.
Lots of wind today, mostly from the west-southwest so we averaged 12.7mpg today....

Have a great day tomorrow
Jim and lInda

Heading East

Unfortunately, our time with Bobbie and Jim Chapman has come to an end until September.  Sunday morning, they headed north to Colorado and we headed south to Albuquerque.  As usual, we had a great time with them and are looking forward to our time together later this year.

We had an appointment with Camping World this morning to get the water heater repaired (it would only work on propane).  Luckily, it was an easy repair only requiring a heating element and our extended warranty paid for part of it.  We are now comfortably set up at the campground next to Camping World and will start our journey east tomorrow morning.

The weather has finally started to warm up here……and not as windy!  I guess we shouldn’t complain too much as our “winter” weather was very mild here in the southwest.  But, as always I am looking for that “perfect” temperature!!!!

Here are a couple of pictures that Bobbie took as we were leaving Cochiti Lake COE park. We never get to see ourselves going down the highway and these pictures give you a sense of what the country looks like with the trailer as perspective.

We will hit the road tomorrow morning and will keep you updated as we move along thru Texas and Arkansas.

love to all of you bum’s

Jim and Linda