Tag: adventure

Day 2772

Ninth travel day.

Tuesday morning on the sixth of May and todays travel should only be around two hours, so far we have traveled 1766 miles (2842 kilometers), and today will add another 140 miles today, and our destination today is a Walmart parking lot in Bowling Green OH, as we plan a visit with Miss Betty and her family later today.

5:45 was wake up time this morning, and I woke to a thunder storm, although it appears to be letting up, but everything just feels cold and damp, I guess that is the price of a winter of warm dry in the desert. Our overnight spot was without interruption, but a steady drone of the interstate, and a delivery truck at the restaurant at six o’clock this morning. Now we get to order breakfast from Cracker Barrel, it will to go so I can enjoy my perked coffee in the coach will watching the morning news. And yes there will be a wee Irish blessing.

As i walked around the building to pick up our breakfast it amazes me that as much as all the Cracker Barrels look pretty much the same, and we have stayed at a number of them, but the atmosphere can be so different, and the old saying that you only get one chance to make a first impression. And before I have even got my order because the cashier was wandering around the store and almost seemed put out that I would bother her, but I got my order and walked back to the coach where we enjoyed breakfast with a cup of fresh perked coffee. Miss Laurie had pecan pancakes, and I had ham and eggs with biscuits & gravy, and yes there was an Irish blessing in our coffee this morning.

We are only planning of travelling 140 miles (225 kilometers), and every weather app is indicating rain, so to avoid loosing a whole day we will make our way to Bowling Green OH, we pull out at nine o’clock and head north on I-69 toward Fort Wayne IN, where we hook up with I-469 to US-24 as we turn east toward Ohio. The rain is gaining in intensity and the wipers are now on the quickest intermittent speed, again Indiana your road condition in horrendous, and as we cross into Ohio it becomes even more apparent, we ate east bound toward Toledo, but will hook up with US-6 for the last few miles into Bowling Green. The rain is brutal and just wont let up as we find a spot in the Walmart parking lot we are a long way from the store, Miss Laurie needs some items for snacks today so I suggest taking Ruby so I go to unattached Ruby and come back well dampened.

I stayed at the coach while Miss Laurie went shopping, because of the rain I started the generator and ran it for almost an hour and a half, part of the last half hour was to operate the air-fryer while Miss Laurie made bacon wrapped cheese stuffed dates, always a hit where ever she takes them. We are ready to head to Pemberville shortly after two, we have not visited Betty since last October and she has had a new house built since then, so lots to catch up on as she prepares her present home to be shown this weekend. After a couple of hours we drove past the new home, we will tour it when it is complete this fall. our next stop was Brian & Linsi’s home where they had prepared a big pot of potato soup, the perfect answer to this cold damp weather.

Needless to say we were late getting back to the coach and just couldn’t talk myself into finishing off this blog, in fact I was the first to crawl into bed, I even turned on the mattress warmer as I crawled in between the sheets. To say I was tired would be an understatement it is tiring driving in the rain, it just takes so much concentration that it beats you up mentally as much as it does physically.

Today’s numbers: 2:54 run time, 139.5 miles (224.5 kilometers) we consumed 17.3 gallons (65.5 liters) of diesel fuel, we only averaged 47 mph (75.6 km/hr), and averaged 8.0 mpg (29.4 liters per 100 km). The speed was so low because we hit three sections of road construction on I-69 and a accident on I-469 that had some stop and go traffic, the rest of the numbers look good

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)