Day 37: Slippery when wet: Robertsville, MO to Chesterfield, IN
Before bedtime the Camp Host came by and confirmed our move. A little later I went out and swapped the signs cause he put the vacant sign on our new site and the occupied one on our old site.
Pretty good sleep. It rained a fair amount and there was some thunder activity not too close to us. Something soothing about the sound of rain hitting our tin roof.
I set out on my walk to do the Lost Hill trail. It was only 300 meters to the trailhead. Did I mention it rained? Trail plus commute was 4.8 km. The trail was up and down with mostly exposed earth and leaf covered earth as the substrate. Did I mention it rained? Did I mention it was still raining? I had to slow down my normal pace as it was slippery. There was a sign at the trail head explaining the things you may encounter. Did I read that? No. I do remember seeing the word “slippery” in there somewhere. About 1.6 km into the walk I slipped as I was trying to slowly feel my way down a hill. Right foot ended up under my butt and my knee hit something. Here are the pictures from the walk.
Not a terrible injury. I completed the trail at a pedestrian clip to avoid slipping badly. Knee a bit swollen. Once back to the van, Mrs Milddogs handed me some mud free clothes and I headed over to the shower to clean up. Then I rinsed the shoes in the water spigot. Lot’s of muddy clothes. Wet shoes. All hopefully drying in the van.
The downside to this was that it delayed departure about an hour and that pushed us into rush hour in Indianapolis, IN. We ate about 45 minutes of delays. Also of note is the fact that we crossed into EDT when we hit the Indiana border.
We did see the Golden Arch of Freedom in St Louis as we drove by. It’s impressively large. We took some crappy pictures but you can google better ones.
We arrived at Mounds State Park (I do not name these things) around 1830, set up quickly and ate our second meal of Missouri Hick BBQ (it’s all gone now).
Post dinner I brought the garbage over the dumpster. After tossing it in, as my dumpster lid closed, so did the adjacent one and out jumped a racoon. This place is also like Murphy’s Point! (8 racoons per site). I have a long standing racoon phobia, I hope I am ok!
This park seems ok. We won’t be here long enough to explore it much. There are some nice trails, apparently. I’ll find a non-slippery one in the morning. Supposed to rain overnight but be done my morning time. Not sure what clothes / shoes will be dry enough to wear in the morning. Right now we have the furnace running and the windows open a bit.
Tonight we shall consume all of our surplus alcohol to avoid border hassles! JK, we don’t have much.
Tomorrow our last state border, our last country border (ok, the second and last) as we head to Sarnia, ON.
That’s it for now.
Updated map!
