Sunday, August 19, 2007

Moving Time

We enjoyed a quiet day at home last Sunday. The weather was a little cooler, so we had lunch on the patio. We both sat outside reading our books, till we finished them. There was time for naps and playing cards. We had cocktails at the creek and watched the hoards of ducks on the creek. The babies have grown so much that they are hard to tell apart from the adults. A month is a long time in “duck years” I guess.

Monday found us at the casino for one last fling. No, it wasn’t profitable. Yes, it was enjoyable. We stopped at Maggie Valley Pizzeria on the way home for one of their wonderful special pizzas. We nibbled on snacks and had a late dinner of delicious pizza before watching the Bronco game. We only watched the first half and then it was bedtime. But we found out in the morning that there was very little scoring in the second half anyway. So I guess we didn’t miss anything. Hooray for the win!

Tuesday was kind of an organizational day. Then we went out to dinner. We went to Sweet Onion again, since we had enjoyed it so much the first time. Then we got real serious about organization on Wednesday. We got most of the outside stuff packed away to make the final cleanup easier in the morning. Most anything we wouldn’t need was stowed away.

Thursday morning we took off for the next stop in Kentucky. Not far from Knoxville, TN, we had a jack error. This happens occasionally and can usually be fixed on the fly. Not so this time. We pulled onto an off ramp and played with it until some lubricant finally got the thing to retract all the way. But by Somerset, KY, the darned thing went off on us again. It was mid-afternoon and hotter than you-know-what. We pulled into a K-Mart parking lot and started working on it, but it went down all the way and would not come back up. After a couple of phone calls we learned how to raise it manually. Whew!

We arrived at Diamond Caverns RV Resort late in the afternoon and had a hard time finding a spot we liked (it wasn’t assigned, we could pick). None of the sites seemed very level, but we finally got onto one and got leveled out pretty well. The worry of whether or not the jack would come up gave Julian a restless night. So we went through the exercise of raising them and it was perfectly fine. Did the whole thing again and it was perfectly fine. So maybe it will behave. In any case, we decided against changing plans to go for service.

We did some driving around to see the area. We went up to Mammoth Cave which was only a few miles from our campsite. We picked up all the info so that we could decide which tour to take. So Saturday, we went back to the park and took one of the tours. We walked about 2 miles in under two hours with over 400 stair steps included. It was work getting up some of those steps – we walk a lot, but don’t do steps or hills that much. The cave was very cool to see. But it was just a cave – not nearly as visually interesting as Carlsbad Caverns. There were no stalactites or stalagmites, but impressive in its immense size. Here’s a shot of us outside, after finishing the tour.

After that, we drove to Bowling Green, only about 30 miles away. We had lunch and did some scouting around there. By the time we got home, we were pretty tired. Julian took a nap and I went to the Pavilion to get onto the internet.

We will be leaving here on Tuesday, 8/21. After 2 days of driving, we’ll be at Lake of the Ozarks for 9 days. Hopefully we’ll have pictures to share while there. I’ll only have dial-up access, so the blog entries may be few and far between.

As always, happy tails till we meet again.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Guys,
Good to catch up with you. Hope you're having fun in Lake of the Ozarks. I bet it's pretty there.

Happy Happy Birthday, Julian for Wednesday!!!

Louise & Neil said...

Wow! Looks like you guys are really have a great time; beautiful scenery. There are a lot of mountains back there, but they sure are beautiful.
I think you guys should have backed a couple miner's helmets to use in all those caves you're visiting!
Julian - Hope you had a great birthday. We're looking forward to seeing you when you get here to Colorado. Enjoy!