Day 2770

Over the river!

Sunday, the seventh day of travel on our trek back to Ontario and after yesterdays long wet day we will be taking today slower hoping this rain will clear our of our way. We will cross the Mississippi river first thing today which means that we will also be in another state, the state of Illinois and while we don’t have fond memories of the states highways. we are hoping for good weather.

Breakfast this morning is with Nick & Emily at the Cracker Barrel, they live approximately one mile away, we have known Emily since the fall of 2021 when she was the volunteer coordinator at the Arboretum. And if you have ever had the pleasure of working with this young lady, she is so committed to what ever she takes on it is easy to give what ever you can to help her succeed. Since the last visit in the spring of 2024 Nick has proposed and a wedding has been planned for the near future, they will make a beautiful couple and we will try to visit when ever possible.

So breakfast was great but they did not have any blessing for my coffee, but the company made up for it, we tied up a table for a couple of hours and it was great to catch up. The parking lot is busy with restaurant patrons so we need to get a move on to maneuver out of our parking spot and find a spot to reattach Ruby and get on the road. By 10:30 we were headed toward tonight destination just a Walmart parking lot a couple of hours away, after yesterdays five hour drive in the rain everyone needed a break. We are pushing a rain storm that just doesn’t seem to want let go and move on, so weather cooperating tomorrow we will get through Indianapolis around noon and will celebrate with another stop at a cracker barrel east of the city.

Todays drive was not without it’s challenges, as we traveled north on I-55 to the I-255 bypass which keeps us out of St Louis and its bad roads, a few mile down the highway all three lanes are closed for construction sending us onto secondary roads and me scrambling for some GPS guidance from Navi. I had started the day without the GPS system thinking I knew the route without any electronic help, and without the road closure I would have been fine, but detours are difficult with 65 feet of vehicles and are hard on fuel mileage. But we made it to I-70 east bound toward Indianapolis the next large metro area we will transverse tomorrow to our Walmart parking spot for the night.

So lets talk about solar in the rain, even on rainy days our solar array will harvest some power, the issue is that it will not bring in as much power as we have used, the last couple of days we have not quite got our battery bank to 100%, oh we got close 90 some percent and because of cloud cover today we were loosing a lot of power. To compensate I decided to run our generator for an hour to help with recharging of the battery bank, so at 12:30 our batteries were at 64% and after an hour of generator time we are now at 84%. And while not really solar the use of lithium batteries is what allows that kind of replenishment, lead-acid batteries would never accept power that quickly, and being a mechanic who only ever thought of a battery as being anything other that a necessary evil to start a vehicle, I have a whole new respect. So as much as I love our solar array a BoonDocker can survive quite well with generator and lithium batteries.

Today’s numbers: 119.2 miles (191.8 kilometers) 2:04 drive time, consumed 15.9 gallons (60.1 liters), average speed 57 mph (91.7 km/h), with fuel mileage of 7.4 mpg (31.8 liter per 100 km)