Illinois

     The Illinois Thousand Trails campground here in Belvidere is OK and we have extended our stay another couple days to meet up with AJ who had to fly in today due to a family illness. I have become sick, (I think Chicago did it to me!) and have been down for the whole day. We are leaving here early on Friday morning to get into Pennsylvania as quick as possible since there really isn't a while lot to see on the upper parts of Indiana and Ohio.

     On Tuesday we went into Chicago since we had never been there as a family and it was, well lets just say its a big city and the drivers are actually worse than Denver. The train routes are expensive from where we were, 50 bucks for us to get into town on a line that was to far from the attractions. We had to take a couple cabs around to the Planetarium and Millennium Park to save on time as the bus maps were just to much for me to navigate on a 6 hour trip.

Upper Level on the Metra train

   

Chicago Sky line from the Planetarium.

Working the Robot Arm!!

Learning to poop in space!

The Bean in Millennium Park!

     As I said, we extended our stay here at this campground so we were in one place for a week and like most TT campgrounds, most sites are people that live or keep their rigs here. So since these trailers are used like cabins for the weekends it was real quiet Monday - Wednesday and we had everything to ourselves. We are off to Pennsylvania to spend a week before heading up to see Jon, Heather and my favorite girls Allison and Julia for a few days. We will be in Northampton Massachusetts for almost two months before we head south. 

     The last thing I wanted to go over is the whole double black tank fiasco that I went through a couple weeks ago. I am glad to announce that the gagging has finally stopped a short two weeks after the whole hellish ordeal and the nightmares have also subsided. I would like to thank John and Jema for letting me know everyone has gone through this at least once. 

From here, looks like being the Daddy is hard!

This goes into the, “Someday we’ll look back on this and laugh…but not today…” category.

            Further proof that Alan is a keeper and being the Daddy is really hard. Twice now the black tank valve has been open when we go to dump. The result is that all the, er…. Black waste… is in the pipe, not in the tank so when Alan goes to put the dump tube on, it all, and I mean ALL, comes spilling out. The result is a fantastical stream of waste and profanity that really should be (but hasn’t been) video-ed. It’s reminiscent of that epic scene in RV in which Robin Williams launches a poo geiser.  This happened all the way back at Leech lake but the trauma of it is just now far enough behind us to bring it up. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that we don’t have to re-visit this epic, poo covered event.

     The brilliance of starting our full time experience at the Rally has become evident. We were able to hook up with Jema and John Anderson and the kids in Minnesota. They are from the area and had great advice about what to see and do. More importantly, they are outstanding people, parents and travelers that we adore. They are kind and loving, and they sat and talked through so much with us. Jema taught me how to make Kefir soda! She is an amazing artist and teacher, John is full of fantastic ideas and has really helped us to see more of life outside the box.

    Minnesota is clearly the land of many lakes and even more photo ops that require our family to be in a fishes mouth….

I'll post more when we get somewhere with better Wifi!