Home to Minnesota, March, 2025

April 2025

Our original departure date from Orange Beach was March 15, 2025. The plan was to go to the East Coast, specifically to Saint Augustine, FL, and then to Jacksonville, FL. From there we were going to spend 6 days in Savannah, GA. And then 6 more days in Charleston, SC. Then we were going to visit our friends, Ed and Deb, in Central NC, and Hans and Marjet in Western SC. And a few days in Asheville.

That entire part of the trip got canceled because I had an important medical appointment change to April 15. Schedules just didn’t fit so we stayed in Orange Beach until March 22 and headed north towards Lebanon, OH to see our friend Karen and her new puppy Scout.

This part of the trip was always part of the plan. We have known Karen and her husband, Ted for many years and met up with them often on our travels in many places. Ted passed away a couple of years ago and we really wanted to see Karen.

So we went north to just north of Birmingham, AL, and then on up to Mammoth Cave National Park which just happened to be along the way in Kentucky.

Mammoth Cave is described as a large plate of spaghetti with layers upon layers. More than 400 miles of the cave have been explored and mapped with several miles of newly explored cave added each year. Mammoth Cave is the longest cave in the world.

We didn’t have much time so we went to the Visitor’s Center. There were stories of the early explorers with crude equipment crawling through barely big enough holes. One fellow got stuck and after 7 days of trying to get him out, he died.

Going down into a cave (like Carlsbad Caverns) where you can walk around in big expansive rooms is OK.

There is just no way I would crawl, slither, into a wet rocky hole not knowing what was ahead. No way.

We got to Lebanon, Ohio, and checked into a KOA campground not far from where Karen lived.

One thing we really wanted to do was to visit the Air Force Museum in Dayton which was only an hour north of Lebanon. Our friends, Rich and Peggy Bowman lived near the museum. They are both retired Air Force officers so who better to act as our guides?

There were big giant rockets.

And projects Rich had worked on.

A Lockheed Constellation “Columbine” which was Eisenhower’s presidential plane, the first one called “Air Force One”.

And JFK’s “Air Force One” that we could walk through and see where LBJ was sworn in.

And the Memphis Belle B-17 from World War II.

We were there for several hours, nowhere near enough to see everything. Rich said that going through the entire museum and reading all of the information would probably take a week.

We enjoyed our short visit and lunch with Rich and Peggy. We were grateful for the guided tour.

Karen lived not far from the RV park where we stayed. She came to visit with her less than one-year-old puppy, Scout.

Scout was all puppy, full, of energy, ready to play.

She and Maggie ran and ran and chased a ball until they were worn out, if that is possible.

And then some rest time.

We went out to lunch with Karen to a classy older hotel for lunch and to a pub that she and Ted liked to visit.

We walked through a park where a tree had been planted in Ted’s honor.

It was nice to see Karen and Scout. We will always miss Ted.

We continued towards home through strong winds and almost continuous rain towards Bloomington, IL.

We stayed at a campground on a lake, and the wind was howling all night long.

We headed north from there into Wisconsin and stayed at the only campground open between Bloomington, IL, and home near Portage, WI. It was the Sky High Campground. It was at the top of a ski hill at the end of a winding road. There were quite a few campers there that appeared to live there. No one there in the office, no maps to help us figure out how to get to our site. We just followed the obvious route which of course led us through a low area, wet and muddy. I plowed through and up another hill and around to where we stayed for the night. We crossed this place off the revisit list.

Part of the problem going south in the late fall and north in the early spring through Wisconsin and Illinois is that there are almost no campgrounds open. We are OK with staying in a Walmart overnight but some nights it is nice to have at least an electric hookup.

Going through Iowa and Missouri there are many more options for overnights.

We got home right at the end of March, one of our earliest returns in years.

We backed the coach into the barn, plugged it into power. We went into the house and checked everything out, all was OK. We turned on the water heater, turned up the thermostats, and returned to the coach for supper and a warm last night.

It snowed overnight, not a lot, but enough to remind us that it was Minnesota.

Maggie was happy to be home.

She just crawled into a favorite chair for a nap.

We arrived home with a two-page list of summer projects. Many were just finishing them up sort of things. Some were big projects, bigger than we had envisioned.

More Later, Much Love,

Roger and Susan and Maggie