Day 29: Mounds State Park, Anderson, IN: Sometimes you feel like a nut

Let’s talk about the West St Louis KOA. I’ll try to be clear. Don’t stay there. Enough? Well, if it is summer and you will be running your A/C all night and don’t care about traffic noise nor trains running right past the park, by all means, stay there. Or maybe you want something close to Six Flags, stay there. Otherwise, try something else. Like maybe a Bass Pro or the Walmart down the road (just as close to the highway but slightly further from the trains). We stayed as we wanted electricity and to be able to have showers. We should have sought another choice.

Morning walk time. Just did some laps of the park. I did walk on historic route 66 for a bit just to reclaim that prize. Over by the tent area, which sits above the petroleum pipeline, there was a nice creek.

While I was out, Mrs Milddogs had a disagreement with the coffee maker. She uses a Nanopresso most days and it can be opinionated. Fortunately, that was all cleaned up when I got back from laps of the park. Or was that a lapse of the park?

We did not dump on exit, thus keeping our record in tact.

Mission today was Mounds State Park. We stayed there last year as well. It is only ~400 km from Sarnia so splits the day nicely. We didn’t do anything really remarkable today. We did not cross the Mississippi close to the Arch, the GPSs would have none of that. Traffic delays. We confirmed Illinois is boring to drive through. We missed the tacky roadside signs of Missouri. We attempted to stop at a rest area for picnic lunch but it was closed so we ate in the truck parking area of a gas station near Effington, IL.

Next highlight, we crossed into Indiana and the clocks shot forward an hour.

That’s about all of the excitement from the drive. Well, all of Indianapolis’ highways seem to be under construction at the same time. Kind of like Detroit. It’s like they did SFA for 20 years and then figured they should do it all at once. Maybe Detroit was just figuring they would wait out the exodus and see what roads they needed when and if things settled down. We get to navigate that mess tomorrow.

We arrived at Mounds State Park around 1630 EDT. Checked in and went right to our site. Same one as last year. The showers are still closed for winter so I shall arrive in Sarnia a little smelly.

Amy and I went for a walk while Mrs Milddogs cooked our remaining chicken as Canada and it’s fine chicken marketing board no longer appreciate you bringing raw chicken into Canada. Cooked is just fine.

We had leftovers from Missouri Hick for supper with a bag-o-caesar salad. I did the salad mixing all by myself. Far less than 10% escaped.

We decided post dinner to fill up the water tank and to dump the grey and black tanks. Did it tonight as it is supposed to be very rainy in the morning. We do not have water at our site. We did fill up at the appropriate spot for potable water. Dump was uneventful. Yay! After we re-parked, we went out for another walk on the trails. Nice trails here.

This park allows fires. Boo. It’s amateur hour. None upwind from us so far. One nice thing about our spot is that we get to watch many of the new arrivals try and get set up. Always a spectator sport. I did more than my fair share of entertaining back in the day. Like the time I parked right over the fire pit. We lit a candle. Or the time I dropped the driver’s side of the trailer into a ditch when I totally missed the campsite entrance. That was a tow truck bill.

Hoping for a boring drive tomorrow. Sarnia will mark the end of the blog. We don’t care if Ohio breaks our windshield cause that has already been taken care of! Oh, I forgot the crack updates. The crack has stabilized. We may have seen a few “Darlenes” in the Ozarks that might know the crack. That’s it for the crack update.

Where is Almond Joy State Park?: