Well, RATS!!!

For the third week in a row, with a shopping cart full of Big Red and an another cart overflowing with Mikesells Good & Hot Potato Chips, I ignore the stares as I stand in the checkout line. I’m preparing for our upcoming trip to the uncivilized sections of the country, obviously.

Saturday, October 23, 2021 Orange County Indiana

We, Mary, our son Daniel (Danfromindiana.com), and myself set out on a beautiful fall day to find what I only know as Little Africa. While I’v not done any research, Daniel has and Little Africa is where some freed slaves established a small community back in the 1830’s(?). All that’s left now are a few, rapidly designating, headstones in a cemetery.

This was our second attempt at finding the cemetery, the first was a bust because of some fallen trees hiding the correct trail.

How did they get there you may ask, according to Daniel the slaves were bought down in Orange County, North Carolina and brought here to be set free. Again according to Daniel’s research some Quakers, not believing in slavery, sold everything they own, bought the slaves, and moved themselves and the slaves up here to Indiana, in doing so they not only freed the slaves they established Orange County Indiana.

Now of the question of why we wanted to find the cemetery. Well, according to Daniel’s research the Quakers who brought them here and set them free were direct descendants of mine.

One last tidbit of information, while we couldn’t find any road signs by this name according to the GPS the name of the road y0u take to the trail head is……………Greasy Gravy Road.

More Below

Wednesday, October 28, 2021, this is not really a surprise.

Well, it looks like we’re going to be hanging around a couple of more weeks than planned. Mary has a kidney stone, either again or its left over from the one she had last year. It actually showed up on her CT, cancer followup, scan she had when we were here in August.

The strangest thing that I’ve ever heard of is the stone doesn’t show up on a regular X-ray, but showed up on a CT scan and ultrasound. She goes in on Monday, the 1st of November to have it blasted. If last year is anything to go by we’ll be here for at least 2 weeks after Monday……………we gotta do what we gotta do.

Friday, October 29, 2021, Ah yes, fall in Southern Indiana, a time for leaves to fall, the temperature to drop to unacceptable levels and cancer diagnosis and kidney stones……….. I really love Indiana…….. NOT!

Monday, November 1, 2021 

Mary went in to have something done with her kidney stone, the doctor was kinda anxious to get it out, he thinks she should be in a good deal of pain.  Well after the surgery she’s still in possession of said stone. I think the Dr’s plan is/was to insert a stent to expand a tube and now on the 15th he’s planning to somehow grab, to bust, the stone and pull it out. I guess we’ll find out whats going on the 15 then when she’s going in for another procedure. UGH

Tuesday, November 2, 2021, well that took longer than expected.

The other day I had the generator serviced a Mary’s moms, he noticed a failing part  (an air dryer in the braking system) and suggested we have it looked at soon.

With cold weather moving in we decided to move to a Campground where we can plug in. We also checked around to find someone to replace the air dryer on RUBY, what took longer than expected was getting ready to pull out from Mary’s Moms. That took longer than expected. Then we went to Edwardsville for some diesel fuel and propane before heading to the repair shop, they almost didn’t have time to track down the part before quitting time.

We ended up spending the night in the truck repair parking lot and ran the generator all night, this is only the second time we even considered running it that long. We had kinda planned to spend the night in their parking lot, we had just planned to arrive earlier so they could look at it and track down the needed parts today.

Wednesday, November 3, 2021

They were able to track down the needed part, and get it in stalled, while they were tracking down the part we had to decide where we wanted to go, all the private RV parks in the area are full and have a waiting list, we thought Deams Lake was going to be closed so we were going to go to Charlestown State Park then I ran across something that said Deams Lake would be open all year, so here we are, we scheduled for two weeks here. The problem with both Deams Lake and Charlestown, they turn off the water and you can only stay 2 weeks, we’re probably going to need to stay another 4 weeks in the area, the dump stations are going to be open but there is no way we can stretch out our water that long so we’re not sure what we’re going to do about that.

Thursday, November 4, 2021

Monday, November 8, 2021

The carpet on the step was getting warn so while we were replacing it Mary decides to repaint the step, before it started to rust.

Monday, November 15, 2021, well that’s not really what we wanted here.

Mary went in for another procedure this morning, This may have been the doctor’s plan from last time but apparently Mary is really attached to the kidney stone, more like the kidney stone is really attached to Mary. Anyway she still has the stone and now has a larger stent in, she goes back in a few weeks, probably for another attempt at removing it, if he can’t get it this time it may require surgery to remove it. Apparently it’s embed in her kidney pretty good, the Doctor thinks she should be in all kinds of pain but she has none, no pain doesn’t mean the stone has not caused some damage to the tube leading from her kidney, apparently it has, only time well tell if she will need to have a stent and have it changed every few months.

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

The White Coach is no more, we donated it to Veterans Car Donations and they picked it up today. It was developing some issues due to some water damage, we didn’t feel right just trying to sell it outright, now it will end up at auction with the money from the sale going to the Veterans.

We originally bought it to drive to Alaska, then sell it, but now I don’t know when or if we will get to go so we felt it was time to get rid of it. We actually decided to donate it while we were in Washington State over the summer.

Since it looks like we will need to stay in the area for at least the next 6+ weeks I decided to go ahead and publish this. This will be the last one until we’re back on the road, whenever that is.

The End