It's Gotta Get Easier - Right?

Day Two – it's gotta get easier, right?

Up at 8am at the really nice campground at the IL State Fairgrounds.  I can’t say enough good about it – really nice showers/restrooms for those of us who don’t want to fill our grey and black water tanks too quickly.  What are grey and black water tanks you ask?  Aah – this is the glamorous part of RVing. 

Grey water is what goes down the sink and shower drains – basically innocuous if soapy water.  Black water is what goes down that other drain – the toilet  I spent a lot of years cleaning up after animals so a little organic waste doesn’t bother me, but, on the other hand, I don’t seek it out and Chuck has a fairly elaborate drain system complete with macerator that we don’t completely understand yet, so we’re hesitant to push our limits.  So, whenever possible, we shower and poop at facilities at the campground.  Just a little discretion until we get through boot camp and understand what the heck we’re doing.  If this is TMI, no worries, I’m moving on.

So anyway, back to IL State Fairgrounds – lovely, nice, inexpensive, great value.  By 11 am we were clean, odor-free,  ready to hook up the Toad and hit the road to a destination as yet unknown, but aiming for Sedalia, MO – the site for boot camp.  Toad and Chuck connected easily but the brand-new, expensive supplemental brake still wasn’t working and threatened to again drain the Toad’s battery.  A phone call to customer service got us an apology and a promise that a new unit would find us at Bootcamp in MO and in the meantime, don’t worry about not having the extra brake.  Hmmm.  Ok I guess.  One last check of the lights on the Toad to make sure we had signals and brake lights and guess what – we didn’t.  Sh*t, p*ss,  d*mn,  f*ck.  By now it was 85 deg. In the asphalt parking lot and we had attracted some helpers – other campers with LOTS more experience.  Several decades later (really about 20 mins) all the connections were reconnected and we had lights.  To cheers and hallelujahs from our helpers, we were out of there and on our way.

Our route took us along some really nice 2-lane state highways, commonly known as red-roads since they’re red on the maps.  Heading west towards the Mississippi River was hilly and scenic and easy driving until we reached the bridge over the Mississippi.  A very narrow, long, high steel trestle bridge.  The semi driver who met us in the middle going the other way had blue eyes.  Does that tell you how slow and close we drove?  It was a little white knuckle but we made it.   

Do you know how you know when you’ve reached MO?  You see big “Elect Todd Akin to the US Senate” campaign signs.  I admit, we weren’t forcibly roped into traveling to MO, but it did make us wonder about the folks posting the signs.  Not deterred, we motored on found ourselves smack dab in Sedalia, MO around 5pm.  We were home, or at least our home for the next 5-10 days.  Parked, attempted to detach Toad and Chuck.  Some uneven ground was making that process difficult.  Now it was 95 deg.  Once again we were rescued by a neighboring, more experienced camper who had a hammer, carriage bolt and brute strength who bailed us out.

7pm found us hooked up, cooling nicely with the AC in Chuck, eating BLT’s and drinking an inexpensive California chardonnay.  It feels really good to be settled for a couple of days.  Tomorrow we don’t have to be in class until 1:15 which should give us plenty of time to sleep in and still find the showers and toilets.  And if not, we can perform our ablutions in Chuck and sooner or later we’ll know how to dump those tanks.