June 24, 2012 ~~~  Good Morning!  We heard the cicadas last night for the first time on this trip... easy to understand how they drive some people bonkers.  NOISY little suckers!  They drove me inside ... too noisy!
We'll be off this morning to the SW corner of Missouri to Monett and Neosho area where Darrell has a little more family research to do, and to visit his cousins who still live there.  Supposed to be 100-degrees the next few days, then thunder and lightning by the weekend.  We'll see.  By the end of the week we will be heading in the Nebraska and South Dakoto direction.

We are traveling through the Ozarks... I expected something more "spectacular", but then I'm comparing the Ozarks to the Appalachians... no comparison!  The Ozarks are lots and lots of big rolling hills, and the road we're on is curvy, but nicely paved, not much for shoulders, and has a LOT of roller coaster hills.  The Appalachians have twisty, turny, narrow roads, sometimes the pavement is not so good, and you travel up the side of one razorback ridge to the bottom of the next ravine in short order, with what appears to be 1000-foot drop offs and the road crumbling away on the sides! 

Anyway... it was kinda pretty, and lots of ranching... cows and horses, and in some places lots of single wide mobile homes with the usual accoutrements that I've described before.

So... we rolled along.  We did start seeing an inordinate number of turtles and armadillos ran over on the roads.  We will never see a LIVE armadillo because we don't drive these roads at night.  So... we watched for a good road kill so I could get a photo of an armadillo.  Found a "good" one that had probably been hit last night.  Here it is:

After this photo was taken, we decided I had learned yet another Valuable Lesson in traveling, and also decided to summarize the lessons one or the other of us, or both of us, have learned since purchasing and traveling in our camp trailer. 


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#1:  Always be sure all the windows are closed in the camp trailer before taking off if the mini-blinds are down.  If one leaves the windows OPEN for some air circulation and the mini-blinds are down, you will find the mini-blinds in a pile of 2-inch pieces under said window the next time you stop.  **We learned this one last summer.

#2:  CHOCK the wheels on the camp trailer even if you are on a teensy little insignificant incline BEFORE you unhitch from your rig.  If you don't, your camp trailer will roll backwards into areas you do not want it to go.  **We learned this one in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.  Behind the camp trailer was a 10-foot drop off.  Hanging onto the 5000-lb-plus camp trailer will NOT stop it from rolling backwards.

#3:  Do NOT get angry and flip off the locals, no matter how badly they behave on the freeway.  **Darrell learned this one in Virginia.  Fortunately we "lost" the local in traffic.

#4:  Be sure all the cabinet doors are still closed BEFORE you extend the slide out.  **We learned this one today.  We will be replacing one cabinet door and hinges when we get home.  :-(

#5:  Do NOT flip a dead armadillo over with your foot.  No matter how badly you want a photo of him right-side-up.  Especially when the temperatures have been above 100.
**Donna learned this one today today also, as she came gagging all the way back to our rig.

 We're hoping we don't have too many more Valuable Lessons to learn.
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Here is an interesting sign we saw several times along the road deep in the Ozarks:

Bwahahahaha .... yep.  And deep in the OZARKS even he might stand a chance of winning!  (IF he could find enough morons who are registered to vote.)



Here is a photo of the landscape from up in the Ozarks.  This beautiful big lake is one of many in the area.  Walleye is the "fish of choice", but they also catch record breaking bass, perch, blue gill, pike, and other stuff in these lakes.

We got to our destination in Monett, Missouri and set up our camp, and a short time later got a phone call from our daughter Terry.  She had stopped by our house today to check on things and water my houseplants ... and found a water pipe broken in the laundry room and 4-inches standing water in there, a couple inches standing in the kitchen and carpets soaked all over the place!  She found the water shut off, got most of the standing water swept out, picked through "wet" stuff to take home and wash for us to try and salvage as much as she could.  We have no way of knowing how long the water had been running, but obviously quite awhile.  She will check with Larry T and Randy to see if they can come over and start pulling up carpet and getting it out of the house and fixing the broken pipe.  We're hoping the old fir flooring UNDER the carpet doesn't buckle and have to be replaced.  What a nightmare.

Thank God for our kids, who are "handling" all of this for us, since we are too far away to be able to DO anything ... a very helpless feeling!  We are so used to doing our OWN things, and handling our OWN little disasters ... it's hard to feel like we're "putting this off" on our kids.  Larry T says he thinks they can get the pipe fixed and carpet pulled up.

Gulp!  Glad it was nothing worse.  It sounds "real bad"... but it could have been so much worse.... it's not like our house burned down!  THAT would be "real bad".