Omaha to Shreveport and Back - Day 5
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The 1500 sits waiting to go for a ride at camp. |
Last night the loud cricket visited us again. The temp got down to the upper 30's and until that dumb cricket came we were fine. Yes that's right, the battery ran dead again and the heater wasn't working. I was thinking that I knew that charger was a cheap-o but I thought it might at least survive the weekend. Gee wiz.
I tried to unplug the charger and plug it back in to reset it. This didn't work. It just kept saying "Check the Battery". I'm not going out there to see if the battery was there. After a few choice adjectives and nouns, I told Laura we were going to have to cuddle again. Just before returning to bed I opened up the screen door cover to take a peak out the window. Nothing out of the ordinary...except one thing. The stupid porch light was on. Why was that dumb light on?
I turned off the stupid porch light and reset the charger. Now it is charging again. Almost instantly I turned the heater off to reset it and turned it back on. Very soon we were cranking out heat again and I returned back to bed. Preparing for bed I bumped into the porch light and again it went on. Now I get how that happened. That switch is in a very dumb place.
Even more stupid is the porch light itself. On this rig it is two tail lights with clear covers on them attached to the back of the camper. I call it stupid because they put one of the lights behind the door so all it does is brighten up a little area about the size of a shoe box behind the door. I don't get why they did this because the only way this light would work is if the outside door was shut and you would never have this door shut when the camper was set up. It might be useful if the camper wasn't being used but the stupid switch is inside the camper. I'll probably never understand the stupid porch light deal but it's something I don't care for on this rig.
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Camp is all set up at the Crystal Mines in Jessieville
(just before sunset). |
The next morning I woke up...warm...and decided I better do last nights dishes. By the time we ate supper last night it was too dark to do the dishes. As I started doing dishes, one of the resident camping dogs, a boxer dog, stopped by to see me. He is such a good doggie and I don't recall what his name was. The night before he got a couple of potatoes from the dinner. I'm thinking he was thinking there might be a few more items to clean up. That just wasn't the case.
Overall camping at the crystal mines in Russleville was a lot of fun. The campground wasn't the best and I wouldn't want to ride my wing up to the campgrounds from the highway. That prevented me from taking a ride back up HWY 7 and I really wanted to try that out on the wing. The rest stop where we pulled off the previous day was a short ride back and would of been a nice break from all the digging we did.
We found a ton of crystals in the mine but we didn't find anything so awesome we would need a armed guard escort to get home. I think it was worth the $30 we spent at the mine to camp and dig for a day. The staff was pretty nice too and the two resident dogs were very friendly. Across from our camp was a collection of what I call Tonka Toys and none of them had all their tires. We were asked not to go over there but I took some pictures of them.
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All packed up and ready to go. You can see the evil eye that the
wing gives me in the rear view mirror. |
After digging all day, we finally hopped into the Tundra and made our way out of the mine. On the way out another nice couple stopped us and asked if they could take a picture of our trailer. This is like the third or fourth time someone has stopped us to ask questions about it. He mentioned that he was thinking about making something similar to what we had. We chatted for a few moments, John gave us a pointer on which way to head South and off we went (I had to reconfigure the GPS too).
We headed South and we were heading straight for the Diamond Mines in Murphysboro. John had said that diamond hunting was not going to be as fun as his camp. We wanted to see for ourselves.
We found our way to Murphysboro in about 5 hours but we drove right on by it. That's because the stupid GPS map that I had fooled me right past the stop (on the route we had to backtrack the next day when leaving Murphysboro). We used the GPS to route us through some interesting roads and managed to get back to the park after an extra 30 minutes driving time.
The drive down there was very nice and scenic. We took some really curvy roads and even stopped in a town somewhere (who knows where it was now) and got a Subway sandwhich (yep...she got the meatball sandwhich again). Around the corner from Subway we stopped again and got a T-Bone and a 6-Pack of Pepsi. This would be dinner.
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This is the town where we bought our T-Bones.
Can you guess what town it was? |
Around 5:12 PM we pulled into the park. I know this because they closed at 5. They left us a note on the door and told us which campsite was ours (I called ahead and made a reservation). I must say I was very impressed with this park. It was so cool. We found our campsite and made a few U-Turns to unload the bike and to evetually back into our spot. There were no pull through spots in this park. Because of the incline I had to put the caster wheel on the trailer jack and jack it up about 1 foot in order to get the wing off the trailer. Without jacking up the trailer slightly the wing would bottom out on the trailer.
After the bike was off I was ready to back into my spot and set up camp. Whoops! I neglected to let the trailer down off the jack. The caster wheel broke off and I was picking up the pieces. Fortunately, the jack itself was not damaged and I was able to take what was left of the caster off the jack and get the trailer all set up. I will be looking for a new caster tomorrow. That should be fairly easy to replace. Right?
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Camp is all set up at the Diamond Mine State Park in Murphyboro
(minus one caster wheel). |
That night we cooked a T-Bone steak on the Coleman Grill and boy was that good. Along with that were some good old potatoes and some drinks. Laura thought it was a pretty good steak too. We only paid $9 for it and it didn't look like it was going to be that good. Boy were we wrong. We found our little Coleman Grill at Canfields on 84th Street in Omaha. It was the only one like it that had both a grill and a burner on it. I bought an extension hose and coverter kit for it so we could connect it directly to the bottle on our trailer.
We also picked up a Coleman electric cooler that we have been using on this trip too. The cooler is best purchased at Wal-Mart because for the same price as the one at Canfields and Cabella's you get the $30 plug in adapter for free. It is supposed to keep stuff 40 degrees cooler than the temp outside the cooler. So far it has been working great for us. When we get to camp we plug it into the camper and while we are travelling we plug it into the lighter in the Tundra. No messing with ice this trip.
After dinner Laura and I cleaned up and I took a nice long shower in the shower house. You can't walk down the road at night in the campground without a light because it is pitch black. I managed to find my way anyhow but Laura had to stop me because I walked right on by our campsite. That's how dark it was. I'm really not sure how she spotted me though.
We played a few games of cards with our new deck of KOA cards we got from the camper and boat show at the Qwest Center and then we went for a short walk. Tomorrow we would try our luck in the diamond mines and I would go shopping for a new caster tire (that really shouldn't take too long). Lights out. By the way, we didn't really play cards, it was more like she kicked my butt almost every game. I think the cards were against me.
TO BE CONTINUED...