The Ribbon of Road Ahead

I use it to mean odd, unusual, and sometimes I use it when I really want to say a swear word.

We are hardy campers, Charlie and me. It’s just getting to where we are going to lay our heads that is sometimes the challenge. More on the stress of navigating in another blog post

This night we were in Great Bend, Kansas. We ate a great dinner and felt greatly tired from the rigors of a great day. We had planned to stay in a city park about 30 miles away.

Those plans changed as it got darker. We like to pull into a camp spot in the light. So we started calling, looking for a great place to park in the near vicinity of Great Bend. The second call found a place with space. We followed the directions from a gentleman who made us feel like we were having a conversation with the Dell computer support desk. And the lady who narrates our GPS announced our arrival at the destination (on your right). Where ma’am? Please tell us! We thought we had missed it. It didn’t look much like the RV parks we stayed at before. It wasn’t like any place we stayed at before.
Here were abandoned single-wide trailer houses with broken windows and doors half off their hinges interspersed with newer RVs that hadn’t been moved in months. Grass grew windowsill height around the various Winnebago and Montana branded 5th wheels and travel trailers while the rest of the lawn was cut short.

The roads apparently had once been paved but now consisted of one pothole after another. Instead of a golf cart guide like a KOA, the man who led us to our campsite was driving a spanking new 2021 Chevy pickup (just like the one our son Luke would like to have). I imagined golf carts getting stuck in the potholes, but maybe a beat-up old Ford would be a better choice for this location. We followed him over the curb and up on the lawn and near a post in the ground that had some electrical wires poking out. The guy wanted Charlie to drive the van over the sewer outlet so that the van straddled it. Usually, it is alongside the van on the “service side” where the hose goes. Weird. If Dooley could speak, he would comment on how he felt odd in that strange arrangement. As soon as the man drove off to get a converter for 30 amps, (the power to the pole was 50 amps) Charlie backed the van into the correct position. I could almost hear Dooley let out a sigh of relief.

When I opened the door, the mosquitoes invaded in droves. Believe it or not, this was my first encounter with mosquitoes this year! I could have done without. After he had the van connected to the services, Charlie spent a good amount of time killing skeeters with his bare hands. Ugg, bedtime.

Falling asleep was easy, but at 2 am the pouring rain caused me to wake up and close the windows. I finally fell back to sleep at 4 am. And the alarm rang two hours later. We left this interesting campsite at 7 am and found a Perkins Cake and Steak. I ordered something that turned out to be a very salty starchy breakfast. Interesting. Great Bend was not so great at all.

We drove, or I should say Charlie drove a long way across Kansas and into Colorado. The following two Blog posts will tell the “interesting” events of the next two days.