We left around noon with a 40 to 50 mph head wind. Our first scheduled stop was at our Son's home in Svea, MN, just 7 miles south of Willmar and it came none too soon, as my arms felt like they were made of rubber.
We did find out that the pickup we were towing, suffered a dead battery on the way down. It turns out we had the plug wired incorrectly and was missing a live voltage feed. A half hour later all was well thanks to Gene's quick work.
By the next morning we were happy to find we had a slightly milder tail wind out of the north. The bad part of that was it got much cooler but we accepted it with a smile.
As we headed into Iowa we found much of our planned route had to be detoured around because of spring floods washing out road beds and bridges. We had remembered seeing this on the news but, we had no idea the damage was that extensive! This made for much slower going than planned. We did make it to a little town in the south west corner of the state but it was dark by the time we got there so we drove into a Walmart parking lot for the night. We didn't get a whole lot of sleep due to all the trucks pulling in and out all night.
We got lucky again when we left the next morning as we had another tail wind plus we got out of the hilly country. As we worked our way further south it started to get pretty warm in the Motor home. I started the generator so we could run the rooftop air conditioners. A short time later the generator quit running and an attempt to get it running again failed. I seems the ignition coil started to shot out, swelled up and quit working. In a way this was a good thing as we figured out how much it cost us to run it twice a day. We were using it to run the refrigerator, once in the morning and again when we stopped in the evening. We figured we used about $28 worth of gas each day with the generator. Well we opted to stay at a camp ground just north of Joplin MO for a mere $18. That way we were able to use the camp ground's electricity to cool the refrigerator which stayed cold for over 10 hrs (as long as we kept it closed). I guess we will rethink the refrigerator use on our next trip and use our 12 volt cooler.
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| Primary Transportation on Work Sites |
The next day, after stopping at Colaw RV Salvage to look for an awning ,we made it to NE Oklahoma and checked into a site at the Snow Dale State Park about 6 miles east of Pryor. After getting set up, we headed out to Pryor for a visit with my Oldest Sister, Lois and her husband Herman. We ended up staying in the Pryor area for about 3 days before continuing south again.
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