The big surprise of the day was pulling off the interstate for lunch in Ashland, NE and stumbling onto the Strategic Air and Space Museum.  We had lunch in their parking lot.  Trish calls it the “nicest air museum we never went to”:

About 10 miles out of North Platte, well after sunset, we were pulled over by the state patrol.  Turns out our RV’s running lights and turn signals were out.  We pulled into a closed gas station at the bottom of the ramp where we were pulled over.  After crawling around for a couple hours with the multitest meter, I realized that the module that passes the signals from the SUV to the RV had gone bad.  I managed to find a 12V line under the RV and hard-wired it to the running lights line so we could limp into North Platte to overnight at, yes, the Walmart.

  See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.

After a short night’s sleep at Walmart, we continued West.  Two of the RV’s tires were almost done when we left New York, so when we stopped at a park in Davenport, Iowa for lunch, I called around and found a shop to replace the tires:

We drove a full day and ended up at a gas station in Des Moines in the early evening.  While waiting for the tank to fill, I did a quick search on the phone and discovered that the Iowa State Fair is currently in progress.  We have been using an application using Field Trip on the phone that tells us about local items of interest, and that’s how we found out about the fair being in Des Moines.  Being that we’re not on a particular schedule, we decided to visit the fair!  Trish has always talked about the county fair in her hometown, so I figured she would be thrilled to visit a state fair.

It was, in a word, huge:

We visited the pigeon display are first:

The pig building was immense:

The cow building:

High tension at the horseshoe contest:

Showing sheep for the ribbons:

The fair had a massive midway, and hundreds of RVs camped out in an adjoining field.  Trish had a great time!

We left the fair at 11pm, and stayed that night at the Walmart of West Des Moines.  See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.

We had a wonderful Shabbos at Laurel Mountain State Park.  Here we are getting ready to leave on Sunday:

After a long, long day on the road, we stayed tonight at the Walmart of New Lenox, IL, a suburb of Chicago.    See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.

Leaving our house in Rockland County, NY, we drove through the driving rain Westward. The original plan was to take Route 80 across Pennsylvania and spend the night at a Walmart in Du Bois or Clarion, but I checked my “RV places to see” list and realize we would be going somewhere close to the Cabelas Super Store near Hamburg, Pennsylvania. So we decided to go down that way.  This is the kind of unplanned wandering that we could never do on our strictly regimented summer vacations, but since there are 350ish days left on this trip, why not?

We arrived at sunset and found an entire section of the parking lot is dedicated specifically for RVs:

The superstore is a quarter million square feet is size. The airplane in the background of this photograph is full size, and its hanging from the ceiling. There’s also an extensive aquarium and several displays of stuffed animals like the one shown here:

The fishing section alone is larger than some sporting goods stores I’ve visited in the past.  Good thing real estate is cheap out here!

Our amazing WiFi antenna and amplifier are working incredibly well, and right now all of our wireless devices are connected via our wireless router and through the antenna to a wireless access point at a Lowe’s about half a mile from here.  Amazing!  All of this is being powered by our inverter which is wired into the breaker box, allowing every outlet in the RV to provide A/C power.

We drove about 150 miles today.  Tomorrow we continue to head West, hopefully putting in another 300 miles or so.  See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.