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The 1500 sits waiting to go for a ride at camp. |
Previously
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...