09/15/10 On the Road Again

We are on the road today- headed for Ohio. Cindi posted the pics yesterday of Curtis Watkin’s Restaurant- siteof several wonderful and very filling breakfasts and a couple pics of our site at Wes Watkins Reservoir. Our camping site there was large and except for the weekend, very secluded – only one other RV there most of the time. Isn’t Shing’s silver Mercedes pretty? Rick sure enjoyed driving it. We did sing a little Janis Joplin…”Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz”… Don and Rick have made an excellent pit crew getting the “coach” and the towed car ready to go. We may have to get them matching shirts identifying them as such. There’s also a great pic of all of us @ Karl & Viv’s house taken by their granddaughter. We had an excellent time.

Yesterday afternoon we stopped in Joplin @ a Walgreens to get an Rx for Cindi and do some snack shopping – traveling makes you really hungry. And here’s a plug for Walgreens – great to use when you are traveling – they have all your “stuff” in the computer and there was no hassle for Cindi to get her medications at all. Don drove us out of Joplin and back on I44. We watched a storm for almost 50 miles before we were in it. Amazingly dramatic skies with very dark purple/gray clouds and lighter ones underneath. Then we drove through rain and would eventually see a giant rainbow that would seem to have one end on the west bound lanes. We must have seen 3 or 4 rainbows as we drove the next 50 miles. We stopped at an RV park in Phillipsburg MO and the rain had slacked off but it started again about 9 with a vengeance. We were watching the one channel our antenna would bring in when programming was interrupted for a tornado warning several counties away. We checked the weather channel and you can see the pic of the storm headed toward us – no big wind threatened us but the rain came down in buckets.
Missouri has MoDOT – looks funny on their signs. We are going around St. Louis today - Arch sighting from afar but we will cross the Big Muddy and head into Illinois – hoping to make 400 miles today and roll into Elida mid day Friday.