Summer finally arrived around July and we packed as much fun as possible into the next few months with friends and family, and rocking to the music of Paul McCartney at Target Field in Minneapolis, and Aretha Franklin at the Minnesota State Fair.
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| Water gymnastics |
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| Girls weekend at Contessa's cabin on the Cloquet River |
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| A cart load of kids and a fun weekend at Amy & Dana's |
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| Princess Kay of the Milky Way - Butter Sculpture at the Fair |
We got back on the road August 29th with our first stop in Muscatine, IA. We camped at the Shady Creek Recreation Area along the bank of the Mississippi River. While spending a few days visiting Jim's sister, Jan, we toured 5 villages of the Amana Colonies and the Pine Creek Mill State Park near Muscatine.
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| Jan & Jim working on their book. |
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| View of the Mississippi River at Shady Creek Campground |
Sept. 1st we stayed east of Indianapolis. Although we thought we had the leaking bedroom slide-out fixed, it wasn't. Storms dumped buckets of rain during the night, but we kept dry by putting the slide-out in. It's only an annoyance because we can't walk around the bed and I have to crawl over Jim every time I need to get in and out of bed.
JIM DOES THE ICE WATER CHALLENGE WITHOUT BEING NOMINATED
After a long day of driving through a bit of the states of Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, we arrived at a KOA Campground north of Knoxville, TN. I was getting our "end of the trail" cold beers from the refrigerator and heard Jim yelling something about water. I ran outside and saw he was dripping wet drenched from head to foot, and what looked like Old Faithful shooting up over the top of the motorhome. As he was bending over the water connection, hooking up the water hose, the pipe broke and shot him in the chest with a blast of cold water. It was hilarious.
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| It's a geyser! |
We had planned to stay one night at the KOA, but had to take my computer to the Apple Store in Knoxville because it wouldn't power up. It turned out the "mother board" needed replacing and it would take a day or 2 before it would be repaired so we decided to see some of the local sights. We drove to the "Secret City", a.k.a. Oak Ridge, TN. This was one of the 30 top secret sites across the U.S., Canada, and United Kingdom developing the atomic bomb during WW-II. Reactors were constructed at Oak Ridge in which uranium was irradiated and transmuted into plutonium. And I thought Oak Ridge's claim to fame was the Oak Ridge Boys.
SOUTHERN COMFORT FOOD
Thursday we strolled through an extensive and impressive collection of pioneer buildings and artifacts at the The Museum of Appalachia. The museum tells the stories of the folks that made the Appalachian Mountains their home. We got our first taste of southern
home-cooked comfort food at the Museum Cafe. I ordered the chicken with a side-dish of green tomato casserole as well as a side-dish of corn casserole. The food was fresh, delicious and made from scratch. Before leaving the Museum we stopped back at the cafe and ordered a piece of Hummingbird cake and Peach Up-Side Down cake to go...desert for supper!
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| Appalachian Porch Pickers |
While at the Museum of Appalachia, Bill, the Apple Store guy, called to say Mac was back with the living and ready to be discharged from the hospital. Tomorrow we leave beautiful Tennessee.
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