Limon CO - 2020

Good day everyone, well we made it out of the mountains and landed in Limon at the Koa.  We were here from (9-10 Jul). We needed a place to dump our tanks and start doing laundry.  This looked like as good of a spot as any.  We also topped off our tanks and get some groceries.  Since we have mice, we also picked up some traps and poison to boot. But nothing goes as smooth as you would like... Or should I say my rear fender didn't go as smooth as before the grocery store.  You guessed it, while I was sitting in the truck waiting for Terry to finish her shopping, an old lady driving by braille, came flying by and hit the rear fender of my truck.  "I thought I hit a curb.", she said when I confronted her.  

But she took full responsibility for it and as of this writing, all is approved to get it fixed once we get back to Benson.

 Let's talk about the mice.  The morning we left Jefferson, we put a bunch (6 or so) of cotton balls with peppermint oil on them in the back of the island cabinet floor (the unfinished area that has access to the basement) and a couple of other places in the RV.  The next morning I thought I might have seen a mouse, so when we stopped for the night in Salina, we put more peppermint down, then the next night in St Louis, we added mice traps.  Never caught any mice in the traps but when we got to Shipshewana, we put down poison just to make sure.  I think the peppermint did the trick especially after the second dose.  That last mouse must of been too afraid to jump from a moving RV.  And our RV smelled like Christmas for a few days.  Remember that boys and girls,  Got mice, use peppermint oil. 

(Before and after balsamic incident)

So on top of the fender bender and mice, we lost the cap to the awning roller (again) somewhere between Limon and Salina, the cap of a balsamic vinegar came off and dumped a bunch of it in the pantry, and the top slide molding on the dinette slide came loose.  All of this in a 4 day period. We had to pull the lower part of the pantry apart to clean up that vinegar. I also ordered a new awning cap and had it sent to Terry's parents house.  As far as the molding goes, I might have to get some Brad nails to fix it for good. 

Can I ask why, why, why does the batteries in a smoke detector go bad in the middle of the night? More importantly, why would you need a battery in a smoke detector when it's already connected to a large battery to begin with?  The only good thing that came out of that, is, we now know a 9v battery can last 2.5 years in an RV before it goes bad. 

Anyway, back to the trip.  The Limon KOA wasn't too bad.  We didn't hear a lot of highway noise and there is a Pizza Hut just outside of the park.  The park was doing improvements so maybe next time it will be even better. 

From Limon, we stopped at the KOA in Salina KS and stayed a night.  That's right, we are taking our time going across the country.  Why? Because we can.  This place had a Bass pond in it, where you can do some catch and release, if you can find some water surface.  It was loaded with Lily pads. Again not too bad of a place. I thought I had a picture of it, but I guess not.  So use your imagination...I am.

Our next stop was at the KOA in Granite City, just outside of St. Louis in Illinois and stayed here one night too.  We stopped here purposely.  We needed to stay in Illinois so we can put that state sticker on our map.  This place wasn't that quiet.  Not only did we have a train track right next to the park, we were just across the road from a truck driving school and trucking business.  I guess you can't win them all. 

From here, we headed to Indiana and to stay at the Shipshewana South campground in Shipshewana, Indiana.  Here, we stayed for 6 nights from 12 - 17 Jul.   Why are we here, you ask? Well in a normal year, we would be doing factory tours of RV manufacturers, but this year because of the virus, we just hung out and hit a few Amish stores.  Oh yeah, and get our RV fridge switched over to a 12v compressor style instead of the absorption style. Why you ask? (I think you ask too many questions.) Well compressor style fridges have a big advantage over the other style, like keeping your food cold all the time. I guess the biggest drawback is it will only run off our batteries.  Worst case scenario is we might have to break out the generator if we are boondocking. We'll have to wait and see.  We are getting that done the day we leave, so I'll talk more about that later.   While we were here, we checked out one parts store but it was more like a second hand store with some new parts. Anyway, the awning cap they had didn't look right so I just decided to order it online and put it on when we get to Michigan. While we were out, we checked out this little mall of 3 or 4 stores (it had a quilting store in it.).  While walking through it, Terry saw some Clark sandals and said they were more comfortable than a Lazy Boy chair.  So she got herself a pair. 

But she said I could have a T-shirt...I didn't need any more T-shirts.  We also hit up some meat and cheese stores.  Gotta try some Amish food.  We didn't hit any factory tours or the RV museum, maybe next time.  They also had a lot of horses right outside of the campground grounds.  Guess they needed these to get around. Here are some other pictures of the area too.

So on Friday we packed up and headed to the place to get our fridge done. We wanted to get there early like nine ish. Maybe they can get us in early. Before we left, I wanted to grease the suspension but the hydraulics refused to lift one side of the RV, so I only greased up the side that I able to get off the ground.  I'll look at that problem in Michigan.  When we arrived at JC Refrigeration, they said my appointment was at 6:00am and not 10:00am like we agreed to in the Email. But they squeezed us in anyway.  Found out the 12v line that ran to the fridge wasn't putting out enough voltage to run the compressor, so they ran a new line to the fridge. Of course we had to empty the fridge, but they had a fridge available for our stuff.  It was half the size of ours, so we had to do some squeezing to make it work.  We had to wait anther 30 minutes or so after they were done to ensure it was working properly.  By the time we left, the Freezer was down to -4 degrees.  Before the install, we were lucky if we saw 17 degrees.  Here is the pictures of the install.   Well they got it installed and all buttoned up so off to Michigan we go. See you then.