Sunset Haven Tour: June 12-15 -- On Through the States and Home

June 12-15 -- Trip Conclusion and Review

On June 12^th we began our drive home from Mitchell, SD. Late Tuesday evening June 15^th we were at home. Our driving for those last three days was a little longer than usual. The first night we stayed at a state park in Minnesota. The next morning we were back on the road earlier than usual and moving on through the states. We had to travel through some heavy rain, the heaviest being in Waterloo, Iowa – an appropriate name for such a heavy downpour.

A Best Holiday campground in Illinois was home for our next night. These campgrounds seem to run together to a certain extent. We had rain again that night. We had quite a bit of rain as we made our way back home. Harry would say, “Take a picture”. I would ask him if he would rather have the wiper blades in the picture or raindrops on the windshield.

The last night we stayed in a National Forest campground in Indiana. We had to park in between trees and ended up with a big tree right in front of our door. We will probably remember this camp ground because we decided to go to the bath house and take a shower, which proved to be quite an adventure.

When we looked at the showers heads, they look different from any we had seen before. Being a national park, I suppose they were really trying to go green and save water. We had to have help from the park ranger to figure out how to turn them on. After you pushed really hard on a button it would run for about 40 seconds, and then you had to push the button really hard again to start it back up.

The showers were supposed to have hot water on demand. We kept turning the control demanding hot water like the ranger said, but neither of us ever got any. Harry ended up taking a complete cold water shower. I guess I took half a cold shower, because I was not about to get my hair wet. I could just see me all shampooed up and not able to get the water on to rinse the shampoo out of my hair. Besides I could not imagine that cold water hitting my head. My hair washing would have to wait until the next stop or maybe back at the camper.

After this stop, Harry had targeted Huntington or Charleston, WV to spend our last night. It was around 2:30 PM the next day when we got to that point. We could see that home was around four hours away and we could get there before dark. Harry says that Louise was in a hurry to get home, but I think Harry was in as big a hurry to see home as Louise. We had never been away from home more than two weeks in a stretch before this trip.

Harry drove every mile of the 6,849 miles we traveled. I trusted his driving more than mine, and I am sure he trusted his driving more than mine. While he drove I crocheted several thousand feet of crochet thread. Sometimes I would be making really good time with my progress only to notice several rows back that I had mad a mistake which would not do to leave, so I would rip out and redo. We listened to some of our favorite CD's and one book on tape, and occasionally found a church service or something worth listening to on the radio.

To sum it all up we had a wonderful trip. We made many memories and took lots of pictures. We were in nineteen different states. Harry has traced our route on our Cracker Barrel map with a highlighter. We were blessed with no health problems, and no vehicle problems. We know that there was a lot more to see than we saw, but maybe one day we will be blessed to go back, spend more time, see other things and maybe repeat some of the things we saw this time.