Travel to Escapade, 5/9/14

Day 7 - Friday, May 9, 2014
Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana

I did not write a post yesterday because it was a very bad day, so I am writing about yesterday.  It started out OK.  We continued to travel through Iowa.  The farms were scattered across the rolling hills.  Fields had been planted, but have not come up yet.  There are some green pastures with cows and sheep and interesting barns.

We crossed the Mississippi River at Davenport, Iowa.  Here is what the approach looked like. 

The view up river toward Davenport, Iowa

                                      Looking down river.  Still very rustic in that direction.

The other side of the river is Illinois.  We drove through Illinois and discovered that they have some of the worst roads we have been on yet.  They have a portion of I-80 that is a toll road that isn't any better than their non-toll portion.  This is one of the toll entrances, on the right.

The Illinois toll road has bridges across the highway.  They are rest areas used by both directions of  traffic.  We have been to rest areas that are shared by all traffic, but usually they are located off the highway and you drive to them.  These, you pull off to a parking area, like at most rest areas, but you walk in and up to the bridge where all services are located.  Of course, there are more services here, since you are on the toll road and ordinarily don't get off until you reach your destination

 

Now, things took a turn for the worse.  Like I said, Illinois has some of the worst interstate roads that we have been on this far, in the last week, since we left home.  We thought California had bad roads, but these top them in disrepair.  The pot holes are like craters and you can't avoid them.  Traffic is so heavy that you can't slow down because most everyone else is going at least the speed limit and you would be creamed.  You can't shift sideways to miss them, either, especially with a 1 ton pick-up pulling a 35 foot fifth-wheel trailer.  So, you hit them.  There were people off to the side of the road changing tires in groups of two and three.  Apparently, this is and has been quite a problem for some time.  The news that night, Friday, had a segment on the bad roads and how people wanted the government to take responsibility for damage done to their cars.  We were feeling pretty lucky that we weren't among that group with flat tires or a broken spring, after our experience on the drive through Illinois on I-80. 

When we took a break from driving and went inside the trailer, things were tossed around so much that somehow, either by being bumped by another object or just twisting and bouncing, the glass front to our electric fireplace was shattered.  Thank goodness it was safety glass and turned into little pieces not shards of glass.  Also, it still worked, which is nice.  We had secured the cabinet doors, in prep for our travel to Alaska later in our summer adventure, so nothing had fallen out of the cabinets.  Could the roads in Alaska be worse than what we had just experienced???!!!

That wasn't all.  Once we found the campground for the night, we barely made it into the site as the truck was beginning to skid on the mud as Earl was backing in.  To make things even worse, the leveling system for the jacks decided to be totally out of sync, causing it to say we were at a severe angle even though we were almost level.  It wouldn't let us move the jacks up or down.  We gave up trying and continued to finish hooking up the trailer.  Wouldn't you know it.  The electricity didn't work at the post for our site.  We ended up running an extension to the site next to ours.  Totally frustrated, we went into the trailer to get dinner, clean up the broken glass and prepare for going into the Escapade rally on Saturday, provided we could figure out what to do with the jacks to get them to retract and that we did not get stuck in the mud as we left the site.

We have eaten dinner, cleaned the trailer, and are going to bed and are hoping for a better day tomorrow.

Travel to Escapade, 5/8/14

Day 6 - Thursday, May 8, 2014
Nebraska to Iowa

Today started very early with an appointment at the Crossroads Ford service department in Kearney, Nebraska.  Our truck told us it needed an oil change and they were nice enough to accommodate us as we traveled through the area.  After the service was completed, we went back to camp and packed up to continue our travel to Indiana.  As we left Kearney, NE, we passed under the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument.

We finished crossing Nebraska and are now in Iowa.  Today was the first day that we had to drive in the rain.  The rain was very heavy, but not dangerously so.  Now that we are in camp for the night, the wind is strong and there is heavy rain again, but we are assured that the bad storms are staying away from this area.

Although Nebraska and Iowa have beautiful farm land and rolling hills, I did not take any photos.  This part of the country is much more populated so traffic was heavier and needed more concentration.  One thing that is different in this area and much of the eastern part of the country is that entrance onto the freeway is a "Yield" not a "Merge" like we have in California.  You really have to be careful because, often, the drivers on the freeway do not slow down or scoot over for you if you are coming onto the freeway. 

That's it for today.  We'll see what tomorrow brings.