SAVANNAH, GA. We drove mostly in the rain Tuesday as we left Newland for Lexington, SC for a one-night stay.  The weather was still rainy as we drove here yesterday.  For the first time in our 5 1/2 -month-long trip we are experiencing heat AND humidity.  We had forgotten how oppressive humidity is.  We are parked under live oak trees with hanging Spanish moss in weather that seems like a bayou summer.  We experienced heat on our trip, but had forgotten what humidity of this level felt like.  Hope this passes soon if it is like this in St Augustine. 

Today the sun peeps out from the clouds now and then.  The temperature was 84 degrees at noon.  We may go out today to look around the town, or we may just do some last minute preparation for the end of the trip as we head home tomorrow.  Hard to believe that we actually will be back there.  Wherever we park the motorhome is home for us, except that finding a good church, grocery store, doctor, pharmacy, close friends, etc is difficult on the road.

I had quipped earlier in the trip that we might feel like Lewis and Clark heading back east after their long trip, and the farther east we travelled, the less remote things seemed.  But the farther east we went, the more crowded and congested the roads were and the ruder the truckers who hogged all lanes of traffic as they performed a snail's race with one another.  It will be good to get off the highways.

NEWLAND, NC. We had wonderfully sunny and clear skies today as the Rohrbaughs drove us along the Blue Ridge Parkway and on to Blowing Rock.  We stopped for a very good lunch at one of their favorite restaurants along the way.  It was great having expert guides on this tour.  After lunch we continued on to Blowing Rock where we walked down Main Street stopping off at tourist shops and taking a few photographs. 

On the way back home we stopped off at the Moses Cone Manor Home, the summer residence of a denim textile manufacturer in Greensboro, a beautiful estate.

The autumn colors were so good that I even got some nice shots through the windshield of the car as we returned to Newland. 

Tomorrow we must leave this place where we enjoyed several days with our good friends, whom we shall continue to see this winter, since they leave for their winter home in St Augustine in a few days.

Betty and Steven Outside the Foggy Rock Restaurant

Jo and David Outside the Foggy Rock Restaurant

Artist Sculpture Along Main Street in Blowing Rock

Entrance of Moses Cone Manor House

 

Manor House Angle View

 

Manor House from Back

Autumn Color Seen Through Windshield

Another Shot Through Windshield

NEWLAND, NC.  Arrived here around 4:45 pm today, got situated, then drove the Jeep over to the summer home of David and Jo Rohrbaugh for supper.  It was great fellowshipping with them again and will be joining them for sightseeing in the coming days.

Jo, Chico, and David

   

COOKEVILLE, TN.  Yesterday morning the Tiffin Service Center called to tell us to drive our motorhome to Bay 10 for service.  After we arrived there we were told that it was very likely that only the right front slide would be repaired.  Our three-hour time allocation would be exhausted just repairing that, and it was quite a project.  Fixing that required a very skinny tech crawling into the basement and over the holding tanks, a space about 14 inches high.  Made me claustrophobic to watch. Yet he replaced the hydraulic cylinder, with the help of two other techs, one on either side of the motorhome looking inside the basement as he worked.  It was done quickly enough that most of the other things we needed done also were done by mid-afternoon.  We paid our bill with Tiffin, then drove back to the RV park around the corner to pay for our time there, and were done by 4 pm.  We picked up a supper at the local drive-in restaurant and took it to eat at the customer lounge, where we talked to other customers and watched some TV.  The camaraderie there will be missed.

Today we drove to our reserved site here in Cookeville, TN.  It was a longer drive than the original itinerary would have required, but all has turned out very well, and we are thankful.  Tomorrow will be an even longer drive into western North Carolina, requiring us night owls to get up extra early to accommodate an early departure.  Once there, it will be five nights and four days in one very nice place.

RED BAY, AL (Day 5) Monday.  Things have been slow.  Have met several interesting people who are likewise waiting to have work done on their motorhomes. 

There is a nice customer lounge with Direct TV reception that is good, a very popular place.  We watched a couple NFL games yesterday late afternoon and night (Sunday Night Football).  Getting access to the lounge is more difficult now that we must park in a different RV park and the fact that a tall fence now surrounds the work bay area that includes the lounge.  It seems that last July a disgruntled customer got herself quite drunk and drove her large motorhome full speed into one of the closed service bay doors, mashing it into a brand new motorhome inside the bay that was being prepped for delivery the next day.  Totalled the new motorhome.  The insurance company insisted that a stockade fence be built around the area.  So now we must drive to a new entry gate, and hope it is still open, in order to enter the area where the lounge is located.  No one is happy about this.  When we were here last March we were able to park in the service center RV lot, which afforded a short walk from our motorhome to the lounge with no fence in the way.

On Saturday the 19th we drove to Tupelo, MS to shop for groceries at a full-sized grocery store. We found a pretty nice Kroger there.  It was a fairly long drive, but necessary to find a full array of items.  The local Big Star in Red Bay is rather limited.

Today it is raining pretty hard.  Glad we are not likely to be called to bring our motorhome into one of the service bays.  Tomorrow will likely be the earliest, and we really hope to get started then.  We watch others in this RV park exit and return from service, all of them wearing rain garb and dripping wet.  Nice to avoid that.  Betty is humorously wearing the tee shirt that she got at the Ark Encounter.  The weather tomorrow and the remainder of the week is forecast to be dry.

RED BAY, AL (Day 2).  Today we found out that Tiffin cannot get to our repairs until Tuesday or Wednesday of next week, and that is considered early considering the mob of motorhomes that are here and continue to stream into this small town for service.  If we can get everything done Tuesday, we could then continue with our planned itinerary through North Carolina and onto home by Nov 1.  If instead it spills over into Wednesday, we shall need to rearrange everything to proceed a day later, shortening our visit in North Carolina.

The other repair facility next to where we are parked is booked solid through Dec 12th.  It is very good news that Tiffin can see us as soon as they can.   

RED BAY, AL.  Arrived at the Tiffin Service Center early this afternoon only to find out that their parking area was full.  I had naively thought that this might be a slow time off-season, but it turns out to be peak service season for them because all the snow birds from up north are on their way south for the winter, stopping off here along the way for some needed maintenance.  Thus, we are parked at another RV park in town, which is beside and run by a company that also does Tiffin maintenance work and may end up doing some of the work we need done.  Tiffin has a policy that strictly limits the kind of work they will do on older models.  They are selling so many new models that they are giving them priority.  Our motorhome is now six years old, though we have owned it fewer than three years. 

The fact that the service center is so heavily booked right now may mean that we shall have a longer wait for service than we had anticipated.  We cancelled reservations to two places in order to accommodate re-routing ourselves to Red Bay for this service.  We hope to hear by tomorrow when our work can be performed.  If it will be late next week at the soonest (no work is done over the weekend), we may have to cancel yet more of our plans, including our planned visit with friends in North Carolina.  We cannot help wondering if some of our repair needs were caused by the roads in Canada and Alaska. 

We shall pray that we hear good news tomorrow.  We already must find a way to pass the time here over the weekend. 

MARION, AR.  We are parked at the Memphis KOA, which is NOT in Memphis, TN.  We are on the west side of the Mississippi River in Arkansas.  It is a nice rural farmland area, which is what we mostly traveled through today once we got far enough past the urban overflow of St Louis.

It was a clear sunny day of relatively easy travel.  It continues to be warmer as we head south, but night temperatures still drop into the 40s.  Not nearly as windy now.

Tomorrow we leave for a 2.5 hour drive to Red Bay, AL to visit the Tiffin Service Center.

SAINT PETERS, MO.  We are parked at an excellent city park on the outskirts of St Peters, MO.  Tomorrow will be a long drive to Marion, AR across the Mississippi River from Memphis, TN.  From there we shall head to Red Bay, AL to have our RV mechanical issues addressed. 

The weather is much warmer now, with no concern that anything will freeze.  The winds have died down quite a bit as well.  The drive here was fairly simple except for all the large trucks.  Now that we are farther east, the interstate highways have more large trucks than any other vehicle.
 

LEE'S SUMMIT, MO.  We shall be staying here another night.  We had originally planned to leave for Hollister, just outside Branson, to spend a few days, but as we performed our final steps to leave here this morning, the large right front slide-out would not come back in correctly.  The front end would come in, but the back end remained out, threatening to bend the slide-out.  We called a mobile repair service nearby, who opened a side panel of the motorhome to discover that the rod that deploys and retracts that end of the slide-out had snapped off.  It took two men two hours with a jack and cable tool to get that end of the slide-out to go back in, a little at a time.  Very tedious and difficult work.  Now we must leave it in until we can get back to Red Bay, AL to get it fixed.  We already had a list of other things for them to address, but this will be top priority.

So, we sadly cancelled our reservations for Hollister as well as the ones for Lake Ouachita State Park in Pine Mountain, AR.  It will take three days of driving to get to Red Bay, hopefully arriving Thursday afternoon.  If they are not busy, since this is a slow time of the year, we might get it worked on Friday.  Otherwise, we shall be there for the weekend with little to do, since no one in that area works on the weekend, and the only thing to see there is the coon dog cemetery.  Really.

We are indeed thankful to find someone to get the slide-out back in quickly so that we can leave tomorrow for Red Bay.

LEE'S SUMMIT, MO.  On Saturday we spent the day with Betty's old friend, Gratia Baehr, who lives in Overland Park, KS.  We visited a nearby arboretum together, then had supper with her in her townhouse.  On Sunday we attended church with her at Risen Savior Lutheran Church in Basehor, KS.  This is a very conservative church, likely what Luther's 16th century church was like, only in English instead of German.  It looked and felt like a Catholic church immediately following the Reformation, with much emphasis on salvation by grace through faith alone, but with  many crucufixes inside and outside the building.  The architecture had a sort of 16th century look as well.

LEE'S SUMMIT, MO.  We are parked in a county park southeast of Kansas City, MO.  We finally are out of the prairie wind tunnel.  We have had to sleep with the slide-outs pulled in the last few nights to protect the slide-out awning covers.  The motorhome nevertheless rocked a bit with the winds.

It was a great visit with Leland Nelson in Lindsborg, KS.  He was a great guide to the local historic attractions.

MCPHERSON, KS.  We are parked a few miles from Lindsborg, the hometown of Gene Sundberg.  His friend since boyhood, Leland Nelson, who still lives there, showed us around town and had lunch and supper with us.  Our supper was at the Swedish Crown, a restaurant that serves Swedish food.  Leland's daughter is the manager there.

One of the historic sites that we visited was Coronado Heights.  It seems that the Spanish explorer, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, on one of his city of gold quixotic quests, came to this part of Kansas.  The Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the Roosevelt administration, built a public park here in the 1930s, that included a castle along with outdoor grills and picnic areas for the local citizens.  Even though the weather was very overcast, I got a few photos with my phone.

Coronado Castle on Coronado Heights

Inside First Floor of Castle

Upper Floor of Castle

View Out Upper Floor Window

WPA 1936

Historic Smoky Hill Cemetery was our next visit.  Many local families are represented here.

Smoky Hill Cemetery

Leland then gave us a private tour of the old flour mill in the old town section.  There were many floors of intricate gears, pulleys, belts, chains, and the like that would not pass a modern safety inspection.  So numerous were the places were a limb could get caught into a gear or leather belt that it looked dangerous just standing idle. 

Some of Intricate Workings of Old 19th Century Flour Mill

Some More Belts and Chains

Samples of Flour at Stages of Milling Process

Across the street from the old mill were several historic buildings, one of which was the old schoolhouse, interestingly named the West Kentuck.  Apparently there is no connection to the state of Kentucky.

One-room Schoolhouse

Inside West Kentuck Schoolhouse

Another interesting building was the Swedish Pavilion, built for the St Louis World's Fair in 1904.  It was built in Sweden, disassembled and sent to St Louis where it was reassembled for the fair.  Eventually it made its way here.  Christmas performances are done here, but on this day things were pretty much in disarray inside.

Inside the Swedish Pavilion

After our tour of these sites, we visited some shops around town, then went to the Swedish Crown for supper.  After supper, Leland was joined by fellow musicians for a guitar and banjo ensemble performance in a room toward the back of the restaurant.

MCPHERSON, KS.  The wind has been so bad that WIFI was too unstable last night to make a post here.  We are now parked by a field of very green leafy something about a foot tall, but we have no idea what it is. 

The wind is still fierce.  You do not have to be in Kansas to experience a bit of Oz, since the whole prairie range from Texas up through North Dakota is a wind tunnel.  Driving the motorhome yesterday and today was like sailing a small ship through a storm at sea, over the bounding main we rocked along at 55 mph as large trucks zoomed by at 70-75 mph.  Thank heavens it is not tornado season.

Tomorrow we meet one of Gene Sundberg's old friends for a short tour of the area, then supper together at a local restaurant.

NORTH PLATTE, NE.  Another windy drive most of today.  Wind died down in eastern NE but picked back up as we approached this area.  Warm and sunny, but still very windy.  Will turn cold again Thursday, but we shall be in McPherson, KS by then.  Hopefully it will not be freezing there.

We are now in the Central Time Zone, which we entered about 30 miles west of North Platte.  Thus we have "lost" an hour, but that makes us only one hour off from time back on the east coast.  We leave for York, NE tomorrow for one day, then on to McPherson.

We Are Parked Along a Lake Off the North Platte River

View From Across the Lake

CHEYENNE, WY (Day 2).  Attended church this morning at Northwoods Presbyterian Church.  We were pleased to find a sound PCA church with a good worship service.  They are undergoing growing pains as they puzzle over how to fit 150 attendees into their fellowship hall for next weekend's 2019 Cheyenne Reformation Conference with Michael Horton as guest speaker.  The topic will be Justified: Recovering the Heart of the Good News.  Copies of Ligonier's Tabletalk were available free on the literature table.  What a refreshing experience to attend such a church while away from home!  We talked to someone who had attended their presbytery meeting recently in Billings, MT.  The host church is another outstanding PCA church.  Sounds like this part of the country is similar to parts of the Southeast that retain a sound confessional stand.

We stayed for their monthly covered dish luncheon and enjoyed many good conversations before returning to our motorhome to do housekeeping chores in preparation for leaving tomorrow for North Platte, NE. 

CHEYENNE, WY.  We have been busy traveling lately, so this blog has been neglected.  On the 2nd and 3rd, we were in Livingston, MT, about 40 miles north of the north gate of Yellowstone NP.  Our original plans were to spend a week there, but the weather turned pretty bad.  We saw the forecasts while in Salmon and decided to stay there longer.  Salmon was very nice, and we got a lot done there, but visiting Livingston and Yellowstone longer in good weather would have been great.  Entering Yellowstone from the north gate is much more interesting for me than entering from the south gate.

While in Livingston we drove around the area after arriving in the afternoon of the 2nd.  We got some nice photos of ranch country with mountains in the background.  Below are some examples.

Then we left for Yellowstone on the 3rd and spent the day mostly in Mammoth Hot Springs.  The springs were not as active as I remembered them 45 years ago when I last saw them.  Snow was everywhere this time, and the juxtaposition of snow and boiling hot springs made for many interesting photos.  While there, we got to see herds of female elks.  There was only one bull, which bugled twice as we watched him guard his large harem of cow elks.  The lighting was excellent.  Below are some examples.

Minerva Terrace

Upper Terraces

Canary Spring

Bull Elk

Many Elk Cows Grazing Everywhere

Roosevelt North Gate Viewed from Inside Park

 

Roosevelt North Gate Entry

Roosevelt Meant for the American People

 I am sorry to say that too many Americans I know refuse to visit our national parks because the parks are so crowded all the time.  Even two weeks before we entered Yellowstone people in Salmon who had returned from the park said that it was still mobbed that late in the season.  After the heavy snow storms, things were pretty much cleared out, so we had no problem getting in and travelling in the park.  But it is widely understood that particularly Asians in huge numbers are crowding out North Americans who wish to visit these parks.

It was a long drive in dismal weather on the 4th as we headed to Buffalo, WY for the night.  It was an equally long drive here today, but the weather was clear and sunny, but very windy.  A very tiring drive.  We went grocery shopping tonight and will attend church tomorrow at what appears to be a good PCA church 12 minutes from here.  At least the web site gives a good impression. We have attended some pretty disappointing PCA churches on our trip this year.

One of the ironies of our long stay in Salmon, ID was that it allowed us to visit Betty's old Lutheran church three Sundays in a row!  The final Sunday they were voting on their selection of a new pastor, since the one that we had visited before (and with whom Betty had worshipped for years) had accepted a call to a church in Kansas months ago.  Thus the pulpit was being filled by pastors from nearby Hamilton and Stevensville, MT.

On Monday we leave for North Platte, NE for one night, then drive to York, NE on Tuesday for another one-night stay.  On Wednesday we drive to McPherson, KS so that we can visit nearby Lindsborg, the hometown of Gene Sundberg.  This is a Swedish Lutheran farm town with annual festivals celebrating their heritage, but we shall pass through too early to experience one of those.

Then we shall continue to wend our way across the country on our way back home.

BUTTE, MT.  Our water pump froze last night, but there was no crack in the pump housing.  The housing was pushed from the motor mount by stripping the threads in the housing, so I found some smaller screws with nuts in my cache of parts that I used to re-fasten it together.  Works fine, but I drove into Lowes to get a warming lamp to keep in the basement compartment where the pump is.  We disconnected the water hose from the outside faucet to prepare for the freeze last night, but could not draw water from the tank due to a frozen pump!

We were 1 1/2 hours late leaving the RV park this morning after all the repair work, but got here early enough.  It will go down to 23 here tonight, so the warming lamp is in place in the basement already, and I plan to go out to check on it before retiring tonight.

The drive was beautiful, with snow-covered rocky mountains in the distance with large clouds filling the big sky country.