As some of you might know, we’re on vacation to Colorado. We’re driving our truck and pulling the camper, and we’re planning on staying two weeks. As we’re able to find Internet connections, we’ll post our log and maybe some pictures.
Day 1:
- Departed Peoria at 9:30am
- Lunch in the Quad Cities
- Stopped for gas at 3:00pm in Colfax, IA (14.2 mpg at 65 mph)
- Dinner at Council Bluffs, IA
- Let Evan play at the mall in Council Bluffs
- Left Council Bluffs around 8:00pm
- Stopped for gas at 10:00pm in Grand Island, NE (14.6 mpg at 70 mph)
- Camped in the Walmart parking lot in North Platte, NE
We had originally intended to leave after Evan’s afternoon nap and drive mostly at night, but instead we left after his morning nap. We’re glad we did. We covered about 675 miles in a 15 hour span, and Evan was awake all but 30 minutes of it. He was a trooper though, and just sat there in the back watching the Wiggles and Finding Nemo, only fussing a few times. Usually he goes to sleep at 7:00pm, but not in a moving vehicle, apparently. We made sure we stopped a number of times as rest areas, etc. to let him run a bit.
There’s not much to report on today, since we drove through 675 miles of cornfields, but we did have problems finding a place to stay. Our intention was to find a motel wherever we got tired of driving. We pressed on to North Platte, only to find that every motel room was booked. The next city with motels was an hour further. At any rate, at 12:30am, faced with the proposition of dragging our poor exhausted non-sleeping son another hour only to find no rooms there, we saw in the Walmart parking lot that there were over a dozen RV’s. We left the camper hooked up to the truck, popped up the roof and caught a few hours of sleep.
We discovered our trailer’s battery was nearly dead at our night stop. I don’t think the charge circuit from the truck is working properly, because the fridge basically ran the trailer battery dead. I was surprised to find the truck getting as good of mileage as it did pulling the trailer over the rolling hills of Iowa.
Here are a few of the things we saw that were worth noting (to us):
- 675 miles of corn.
- A Toyota 4-Runner pulling a t@b (neat little camper)
- Archway Monument over I-80 in Nebraska in the dark
- The world’s largest region of McDonald’s restaurants without playlands
- Lots of semi trailers with the “super-single” tires instead of duals
- Electric power generation windmills
- A Kia Sedona pulling a Casita (our neighbors at the Walmart)
- Big gates which could be shut to close the highway
- A small plastic-bodied trailer which looked like it was made by Rubbermaid