We’re at our second major stop on the Roland and Nina Great American Road Trip! We arrived in Chardon late Saturday afternoon, November 8th. We’re in a senior citizen mobile home park that has a few overnight spots for transient vehicles. At the moment we have electricity, water, and sewer. The weather has been very good for this time of the year but around Wednesday or Thursday the weather really takes a turn towards winter. The fellow who runs this mobile home park says that he’ll be shutting off the water sometime on Wednesday afternoon. We’ll tank up in our fresh water tank before he turns it off, dump the grey and black water tanks, and go down to just electricity. That will work just fine for us.
We plan to stay here until Saturday morning when we’ll head eastward towards Albany, New York for the next planned stop with Nina’s cousin. It looks like we’ll park in her driveway for a couple of days! It’ll be another opportunity to fill up with fresh water. Many Interstate rest stops have sewer dump stations so we can empty our tanks there.
We had a nice drive through Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana on our way here. We spent one night in a KOA campground in Rock Island, Illinois, another night in a Jellystone Family Campground near Peoria, Illinois, and a third night in a campground along the Wabash River in Logansport, Indiana.
Along the way we stopped at Carl Sandburg’s birthplace and had a nice couple of hours there. We then went south to Peoria, Illinois and stopped at the Caterpillar Visitors Center. As we were leaving, the right rear tires didn’t sound right and we had a funny noise in the right front so we stopped at a tire store. They were able to fix us up and verify that everything else was working as expected. The Caterpillar stop was fascinating. They make some Very Big Machinery!
We stopped for a bit in Otterbein, Indiana where we had bought our first house way back in 1970 while I was going to Purdue University. The house is still standing and looks a whole lot better than it did when we owned it! They’ve put nice aluminum siding on the house which helped dress it up nicely. We then wandered around West Lafayette and Lafayette for a bit looking for the cemetery where Nina’s father is interred … with no luck. After getting here, Nina’s sister Pam had done some further research in found the right place. Maybe sometime we’ll be back and can go by his grave site.
Yesterday we went to Church in the Chardon Branch for Sacrament Meeting and Sunday School, then drove over to Kirtland to go to Relief Society and Priesthood meeting in Pam’s ward. We saw and visited with a number of people we had known when we lived here some 25 years ago. It doesn’t seem that long ago, but somehow everyone has aged a lot since we saw them last! I’m sure we look exactly the same….
Today we poked around in Amish country, had a great lunch in Middlefield, Indiana, and took a few pictures. The one at the top is among the pictures we took today. The weather was delightful … middle 60’s with a light wind. Tomorrow will be even better, so we’ll do some more sightseeing. Then the weather changes. It’ll be time for indoor stuff on Thursday and Friday for sure. Snow is even in the forecast!
Live is good and we’re having fun!