The Road Goes On…

Category: Indiana

  • Southern US Trip Summary

    This morning at home we feel as though we are living between two worlds. Before we enter back into our everyday life with all its responsibilities we look back on six and a half weeks of excitement and adventure. We’re happy we did write the blog so that we don’t forget all the things we saw and experienced. It definitely is a trip to remember and does rival our Route 66 trip from two years ago.

    What worked well:

    WIND Mobile’s Unlimited US Roaming. We’ve been WIND Mobile customers for a number of years now and their price just can’t be beat. For $15 a month we had unlimited voice calling, texting and 1GB of data while in the US. This allowed us to keep in touch and look up things on the road.

    Good Sam Membership: This RV club membership cost $25 a year and give you 10% discount at member campsites.  It definitely paid for itself.

    America the Beautiful Pass: This $80/year pass gives you free entrance to US Parks and other recreation sites. It paid for itself as well.

    Garmin GPS: We love our Garmin GPS system. At the start of the trip we had the RV/Trucking dezl 760 model but it was stolen in Albuquerque so we bought a nuvi 2689LMT to replace it. These GPS units have campground locations pre-installed and provide lots of information on arrival times, traffic conditions, etc.

    Allstays Camp and RV App: We use this app on our iPads all the time to look for campgrounds. It shows the location of campgrounds and gives information about their rating, facilities and distance from your current location.

    NOAA Weather Pro App: This app for the iPad and iPhone shows a map with weather conditions. It also has the ability to send alerts to your phone when severe weather is nearby.

    Visitor Centres, Park Rangers and Bureau of Land Management offices: These are always a source of great information and have invaluable knowledge of local conditions and opportunities.

    Frugal RV Travel Guides: These guides have great route information as well as tips on inexpensive places to stay overnight.

    Here’s a map of the entire trip. This is an image grab from Google Maps as it wasn’t possible to use the entire GPS track on a live map, probably because of its size.

    SouthernUS

  • Cloverdale, Indiana to Dundas, Ontario

    This morning we were all excited to go to Indianapolis to see Kevin Raber again and visit his new gallery. We’ve known Kevin since our 2009 Antarctica trip and our PODAS trips to Death Valley and Iceland. Kevin used to be the Vice President of Phase One USA and is now the CEO of Luminous Landscape, a great online resource for photographers.

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    Kevin has a lovely gallery/workspace in the Stutz building in downtown Indianapolis. Stutz was a car manufacturer and some of the historic cars are on display in the building today.

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    Ruth loved the old freight elevators and we all enjoyed a nice lunch in the building’s restaurant. Thanks for lunch Kevin.

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    After a great visit we decided to drive the remaining 700 or so kms home rather than spending another night so close to our final destination.

    It was an amazing trip and rivals our Route 66 trip.

  • Newton Kansas to Cloverdale, Indiana

    Wow, US states just fly by when you’re on the Interstate and there isn’t much to see. We decided to make this a pure driving day to make it as close as possible to Indianapolis for a visit with Kevin Raber tomorrow.

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    Our campground for the night was interesting to say the least. It was a tucked away, old, treed park with inhabitants who seem to have lived there in their decrepit, permanently parked trailers for a long time. The bathrooms were old as well, but we were happy to smell the bleach when we entered the facilities.

  • Portage, IN to Dundas, ON

    After a great sleep, we had 7 hours left to go on our drive home. We had an oatmeal breakfast at McDonalds and got on our way.

    The highways we took were quite rough and there was lots of construction.

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    For lunch we had our leftover ribs and Pepsi got to enjoy the left over bones.

    Customs was no problem and we declared our Tillamook cheese, souvenirs and clothes and were sent on our way.

    It was nice to be back in Ontario and we looked forward to finishing the final stretch and to be back home.  At 5:30PM the RV was parked and the unloading began.

  • Ashland, NE to Portage, IN

    After an 11 hour sleep, we departed for Des Moines, Iowa to visit Famous Dave’s for a rib lunch. We had visited this restaurant last year on our trip home and were looking forward to the best ribs anywhere.

    As soon as we walked in the door, the manager, Kevin, exclaimed “Hey, our Canadian friends are back!” and we knew we were in the right place. We had a three hour lunch with spare ribs and back ribs and lots of conversation.

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    We felt very welcome and took home some Famous Dave’s seasoning and received some Rich and Sassy BBQ sauce from Kevin. Around 3PM we departed and had a long way to go to make our 700-800km goal.

    Needless to say we were tired when we stopped at a Flying J truck stop in Gary, Indiana for the night.  This is a very large truck stop with 200-300 trucks and two parking spots for RVs. We got one of them next to the store. A speaker constantly announced “Shower customer number 201, your shower is now ready. Please proceed to shower number 6.”

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    There was no way we could sleep through this all night so we finished our last night of the trip as we began our first, at a Walmart parking lot. By now it was almost midnight.