Well….we THOUGHT we were heading South!!

A quick thrown together blog (what else is new?) to let you know the Cave Dwellers finally got their act together and took it on the road.  We loaded the Hiker on Tuesday, and it sleeted that evening and the temp dropped to 19 degrees.  Needless to say, we had a little trouble with icing on the slides,…and the locks were iced up.  Not to be deterred, MacGyver and I got up at 6AM Wednesday morning and did the few last things before we pulled out of the driveway.  One funny thing (well, NOT funny to Den) happened. We learned to turn off the water in the house before leaving for the Winter…Dennis did that about 7AM…and about 7:10 AM he attempted to fill our fresh water tank…hmmm. Thinking that the water was frozen at the outside faucet, he even used a little torch on the faucet. That was when the light bulb went off in his MacNoggin…DUH..The water was turned off. As you can see, we were a little discombobulated and disoriented before we finally got the rig on the road.

Our first night was to be spent at Rend Lake in Southern Illinois.  We got in about 1PM and got all set up, cozy and ready for cocktail hour…

Just look how cozy we are!! Relaxed and enjoying our first night “on the road”…and the it began….

WHAT THE HECK????? Who predicted this??? We checked Weather Bug and THIS was NOT in the forecast!!

So, this put a bit of a damper on the celebration of getting out of the snowy and frigid Northern Illinois.  We watched our outdoor thermometer continue to plummet…We have one of those clock/thermometers that projects the bad  news on the ceiling of our bedroom…and by 6AM it was 20 degrees. Yikes.

Our plans were to get on the road early..Dennis was determined that if we could get the slides cleaned off of ice, the interstates wouldn’t be very bad..So, he climbed up on top our Hiker roof (while I stayed inside and prayed to Murphy not to slap him to the ground).  Our broom wasn’t cutting it, so I handed him a long thin piece of wood from the back of our truck. We always take some to help level from side to side. He used that as a giant“camper slide scraper” and managed to get them clean enough to pull in.  And after prying, kicking and crunching the ice off our Direct TV setup, steps, and electric cord, we pulled out about 7:45AM…

Above is road leading out of the camping area to the highway….If I hadn’t been so scared I would have considered it very pretty….We came from Northern Illinois with no snow to Southern Illinois and icy, snowy nastiness..However, Den was right, I-57 S was clear when we got on it , and clear all the way..We ran out of snow after about 30 miles.

So, our first couple days of returning to the RV life was, as it usually is, a tug of war between Murphy and us…and we finally won. We arrived here at Grenada Lake, MS, North Abutment about 1:30PM and lovely site it is!!

That would be us…right on the lake…aaaahhh, yes.

They are predicting almost 70 degrees here this weekend, and our first reservation is not until Dec. 7th, so we decided to stay 6 nights to “shed the stress and decompress”…in a lovely spot..FYI, this is and Army Corp campground, so it cost us old farts $10 a night..Looks like we have a plan..and Murphy can take a flying leap!!!