August 17, 100% Humidity

It rained all night, but instead of a repeat of yesterday morning, the rain stopped sometime in the middle of the night. Left behind, however, was 100% humidity and cool temperatures. I actually slept in until 8:30 for some reason. Thankfully, I didn't have to do much to get going down the road. I would deal with the problem of finding a dump site later in the day.

The road out of our little campsite.

       

The first town we came to was Winchester. I thought it would be smaller than it was. One of the things I found very interesting about it was that the courthouse was OFF the square. The square had no buildings inside it.

        

        

             

There is a lot of history in the region relating to President Lincoln. It's pretty interesting. I am reading a series of books now about the Civil War.

Jeff actually "ran" into the fire chief for Winchester while he was going through town. He told Jeff that his son was a firefighter in Jacksonville, which is actually a paid department.

There are more pretty, stately homes in this area! Some are in the towns, but many are out on farmland. I think Jeff and I both are drawn to the yellow ones. It's interesting, too. I know that we would not want to live in a 2 story. But when looking for interesting houses to photograph, they are always the big, old 2 stories!

        

        

Ok, notice the bird house!

These are actually the first horses we have seen in a while. I will mention that the cows here are very friendly, though. They come running up to the fence to see what Jeff is doing when he goes by, or even when I stop on the side of the road somewhere.    

I just loved the way this looked!

     

Flower of the Day is a morning glory!

Our next stop was the rather large town of Jacksonville, Illinois. They had a Walmart and just about all of the fast food places. They even had an AT&T store. Jeff stopped in there to figure out what we could do about our data issue. The lady there, Jill, was very nice. We now have another 5 G's of data each month. It is much cheaper to do it that way than to pay for each gig they add when we go over! It is amazing how much data we use when I fire up that hotspot!

Jacksonville is another town proud of its connection with President Lincoln. As Jeff passed straight through, as we are trying to bump the daily average miles to over 40, I drove downtown to see what was there. I found some amazing buildings! Not to mention that they are working quite diligently to revitalize their downtown area and square. I was pretty tempted to run into Hair on the Square and get a haircut, too!

      

        

         

I never figured out what this building was. Loved it, though!

          

This was in the square center.

       

I was pretty amazed, though, that a town this size, and right off the interstate, did NOT have an RV dump site, or park, in town. I ended up stopping at the fire station right downtown to ask if they knew of anything. Just because I can't find something on google, doesn't mean it isn't there, right? The guys I talked to were pretty nice.

         


They indicated that the only one they knew about in the area was just a few miles north of town. Jeff was currently heading east, but I decided to go ahead up there, as a couple of showers fills that grey tank pretty quickly. At least, we think it does. Even after I have dumped, and a lot of water spews out, the dang indicator light still usually indicates over half a tank.... not sure what that means. We are hoping that the indicator light is not accurate! So, I plugged it into my phone, and asked for the route. I'm not sure if my phone really knew where it was taking me. At one point, after driving down some pretty interesting farm roads, we arrived. There was nothing there, but we were on a street of the same name. So, I plugged it in again, and found it about 1/2 mile up the road.

Finally! But there was no  one in the office.... so I called the number on the door. No way was I driving that far on those roads with no room for another vehicle, and not having success! It was actually a very nice park, but there were only a couple campers there. They even had a fishing lake, and there WERE people fishing. The guy on the phone told me to just use one of the sites, and since he wasn't in the office, he wasn't even going to charge me the $5 dump fee. Sweet!

I drove back, a different but somewhat similar, way, and found Jeff. We were on a real push to get over 40 miles. The clouds had broken by then, too, although the humidity was still there. It was a very nice afternoon.

This is the epitome of what we have seen in Illinois
so far. The railroad track, the corn fields, and everything
is incredibly green

      

Too bad we were in a hurry! This might have been a cool place to grab a beer!

  We finally called it a day, and found a spot of gravel next to the parking lot of a consignment store. One of the owners happened by while I was sitting there as Jeff jogged up. We went over and asked if they would mind us parking there for the night. Whew. Finding a place is sometimes problematic.

Not much in the Mailbox of the Day department, but we did find a mailbox condo.....