THE LONG TRUDGE HOME I: PADUCAH TO GROVE

June 18-21, 2012

“A journey of 2,119 miles begins with a single waffle.”  (Houn, 2012)

Monday. Thanks to our good friend and fellow Lazy-Dazer, Barb Allen, we have a cast iron stove-top waffle maker that really works well.  I opened it a little early for the left photo, but they brown up quite nicely if you leave them alone.  With some TJ’s real maple syrup, breakfast heaven!  We decided to just sit for a day to relax and figure out how we wanted to wend our way home from Cave City.  There wasn’t much we wanted to see that was new for us, but we didn’t want to just hop on a freeway and make time.  We did have to get home in time for Mom to arrive from Indy, but that still gave us a couple of weeks to make L.A.  Very hot outside, so we took advantage of the power and stayed in with the A/C on all day.  I played hearts online in the evening with Chuck, Paul and Zip, all fraternity bros from old Delta Chi days.  I got slaughtered, as usual.  I swear they’re all running card counting programs on the side.  Loni read while I carped.

Tuesday.  Early start this morning (well, getting moving by 9 a.m. is pretty good for us) after a fiasco with the park water system.  We got ourselves showered, ate breakfast (alas, not waffles), and started dumping the tanks.  Our procedure is to hook up the drain slinky to the black valve, dump the black (making sure the dump end is well held down – no more writhing pythons for me), then hook up a garden hose to the park water tap, attach a multi-point spray wand to the business end of the hose, then stick the wand down the toilet straight into the black holding tank directly below.  Turn on water, move the wand up and down while it sprays the walls of the tank, and any “residue” floats out the slinky.  I generally close the valve and let the tank fill up a bit while doing this, to aid in the outflow of gunk when I open it.  We were in the middle of the wand bit when I went to turn off the water flow.  Boing!  The park spigot broke and would not turn off.  We couldn’t take the wand out of the toilet as it would spray all over the bathroom.  I ended up unscrewing the hose from the tap, getting thoroughly soaked until it came off all the way.  I let the tap run while I ran.  For the park manager.  He sent out the maintenance guy, who screwed a secondary valve onto the old one, and thus shut off the flow.  We had quite a lake all around the rig, but fortunately it was all clean water.

Off to Paducah, Ky.  Paducah?  Well, of course.  The home of the National Quilt Museum!  Now, suspend your disbelief.  I actually enjoyed it.  Loni’s not yet into quilting, but does do a lot of knitting and really wanted to visit here.  I’m glad she did.  There was some amazing stuff.  Unfortunately, they allow no pictures inside, but the link above to their website has some examples.  Some of the pieces exhibited dated back to the mid-1700’s and were still in remarkable condition.  They had to survive a couple hundred years of use before being preserved here.  If you’re in these parts, do make a stop.  “Downtown” Paducah didn’t cover much territory, but they did have a small shopping district of old buildings which had some pretty interesting looking restaurants from the menus we saw posted.

Unfortunately, the pie restaurant was closed.  Can’t remember why.  We had a similar disappointment when we visited Pie Town in New Mexico.  I can’t catch a break with pies.  But ice cream, now, that’s another matter.

 

That’s a hot-fudge-brownie-coffee-ice-cream concoction with real (not sprayed) whip cream on top.  Yes, I ate the whole thing, except for the candied cherry, which I loath.  Loni had her ice cream cone.  No paramedics were called.  We had an omelet for dinner, back at the Fern Lake RV Park.  $30 for a gravel spot, but it did have electricity, which was needed for the 90’s+ temps.

Wednesday.  Got up at 5:30 today to try to make some miles in cooler temps.  Sun was up anyway and the birds were singing.  We kept off the interstates, traveling on US 60 across the Mississippi and into Missouri.  This small road stuff leads to some interesting moments.  This bridge is really narrow when you’re nearly nine feet wide with mirrors and trying to keep from scraping your side on the guardrails.  Fortunately, we didn’t encounter any trucks coming the other way.

Missouri down this way was pretty flat and boring, but that changed as we passed into Arkansas.  We kept on 60 as far as Poplar Bluff, MO, then dropped down on state 160 to state 142, which is where we hit the roller coaster.  My god, the hills just kept on coming.  Loni felt very carsick from the whoop-de-doos and the curves.  The insult-to-injury was getting stuck behind the striping truck for a l-o-o-n-g time.

We ended the day at Lake Norfolk near Mountain Home, AR.  Our site was nothing to write home about (nor photograph), but it was level, had some shade (temps in the 90’s again), and we could walk down to the lake.  Lots of folks here camping, even in mid-week.  Those empty spots all had reserved signs on them, and filled by evening.  There was a little swimming beach down at the bottom of the road.  It was way too hot to cook (no hookups here, but we ran the generator a while for A/C), so Loni made a nice salad.

Thursday.  Up at 6:30 to get underway.  Loni’s feeling rather punk, some nausea and lots of bronchial congestion and laryngitis.  I sympathized, as I have been coming down with something for a week now.  Lots of runny nose and congestion.  As I write this, almost a year later, it’s interesting to reflect that this is where my health problems of the last 10 months or so probably began.  As I’ll blog later, it’s resulted in cancellation of two major trips, two excursions to E.R.’s in two states, and no real diagnosis in sight.  Sigh.  Aging ain’t the piece of cake I thought it would be.  No dumping today.  We found a super-WalMart and stocked up on food.  We drove about five hours thru the Ozark Mountains to get to Grove, OK.  Again, we had a day of twisty ups and downs, with a zillion superfluous arrow signs warning of curves.  A single sign warning of a straight would have been more economical. 

Loni was really feeling sick from both the motion and her illness.  We did pass through a cute little town that lined US 62 – Eureka Springs, AR – which existed solely for the tourist trade, with lots of bluegrass music places, arts & crafts, restaurants and hotels.  Even had signs now and then saying “Motorcyclists Welcomed.”  With the twisty roads, I’m not surprised.  It reminded us a lot of Ruidoso and Alta, New Mexico, in the way it existed almost entirely along the single main road and nothing was more than 100 feet from it.  We stayed on 62 until we hit US 71, north on that until we nudged back into the SW corner of MO, to SR 90 west.  A couple of jogs, and we were at Grove, OK, where we made our way to Lee’s Grand Lake Resort.  Their website warned that GPS directions would be unreliable, and provided primitive instructions.  The problem is that we didn’t get into the area via the road in the instructions, which quickly became impossible.  In the end, we fired up Dora and hoped for the best.  I’ll be darned, but she guided us right to it.  This was a rather peaceful spot for $20 a nite.  That didn’t get us much in the way of a site, as the Resort is mainly geared to permanents/long stays, and we were sandwiched in a rather forlorn stretch between (im)mobile homes and trailer residents.

That said, the rest of the Resort was quite nice.

A big lake, created by a dam somewhere, with quarry-like sides (on our side, not the other), and a nice big rambling deck where we could sit and enjoy the quiet.  I may have to re-think this beard thing.

For the residents, there was the prettiest lineup of mailboxes I think we’ve seen.