May 4: Well with a heavy heart but excited to see new places we left River life Resort and the Tennessee River on Day 5 of our trip. We managed to climb out of the campsite without difficulty and headed out to Illinois. The trip to the Wayne Fitzgerell Recreation Area was uneventful but long travel day of about 7 hours including breaks, This site was next to the lake with water views. Beautiful site but the infamous brown spiked balls returned and this time were harder and more uncomfortable for the dogs, We determined that these were coming from sweet gum trees found in the south and as far north as you guessed it, Illinois. This site had electricity but no water or sewer. It became clear very quickly that we liked to use water. I had filled our fresh water take with 25 gallons when we left home and didnt want to fill to the 50 gallons our tank will hold because each gallon weighs 8 pounds. That’s 200 pounds more to lug around. Sooooo we had to go to Walmart to pick up a 6 gallon fresh water can to lug back and forth to the fresh water tap in the campground. Now in case and of you want to stay in Illinois please know that this campground does have bathrooms and showers but they arent heated so we took quick showers in the Airstream. I am also working remotely while on this trip and actually was covering as acting Chief Medical Officer rather than my part part time usual job. This means I needed to have fast internet for video meetings. If you look at the picture of our site you can see a orange traffic cone near my Starlink dish. Well even with that I wasnt getting consistent enough speeds to do a video call. Sooo as a former Boy Scout and MacGyver wanna be I drove my truck to a clearing by the lake, put the dish on top of my truck and using a plug in 12V to 110 AC inverter for my laptop and a portable 300 W battery supply for my dish and voila I ran the meeting in my truck. I thought I was retired.
This was another one day stay to get moving on and after stopping at the dump station (so appropriately named) to empty our grey and black water tanks we left for Kansas City, MO.
Bill and Jo’s Road Trip 