Arizona 2024: Day 4: El Reno, OK: This is audible

Cook’s RV Park was good to us. Fairly good night sleep. Only minor drawback was that the park is at the top of the hill, so vehicles were louder than usual getting up the hill on the 2 lane regional road. It’s an acceptable spot. Maybe not the place you want to be, but at least a good place to be.

Morning walk was in a neighbourhood in behind the RV Park. Note that the RV park only has 32 full service sites and it is more like a big back yard. The neighbourhood was nice and the walk was much faster than yesterday. Knee was back to normal. Maybe the speed came from wearing a brand new pair of shoes. Somehow I had picked up 5 new pair of shoes at Bushtakah when they were on sale. Let’s not do that again.

Post walk we started to get organized and Mrs Milddogs has the brilliant idea to shower again. Who knows when we will get showers that nice? So I dumped the tanks – still 100% faeces free!- and headed to the showers. Once I was cleansed (at least the body was) we completed the pack up and hit the road. First dilemma: Do we loop back the 5 miles to Buc-ee’s for one last visit? We should have, but did not. I can already taste the regret. One clarification from yesterday: The price of gas was $2.599 USD per (US) gallon at Buc-ee’s.

West we go! Like most of the drive, traffic was mostly inconsequential. We took at stop at a gas station and topped up and had some lunch. Sadly, my fusion chicken caesar salad is now gone. Even more sadly, I probably stretched it out a day too long.

We skipped right past Ozarkland. They trapped us last year and we weren’t going to fall for that again. Do not believe the billboards! Mrs Milddogs considered stopping at “The Nut House” but we opted to keep going.

I would like to discuss roadside billboards that feature pictures of food. The food all looks like washed out crap. The billboards are not enticing. I don’t want to eat anything that looks like that faded picture. Just stop! Maybe just put your name, location and a phrase like “our food is too good to show you a crappy picture of it”. Of course you must not use the quotes cause that would be wrong too. I saw a sign in Indiana that said “KFC Buffet”. There was no picture of food. They got that right! I wondered how many degrees of wrong a KFC buffet would be. Eating KFC Buffet is something you might think you should do once, and only once, but there is wide divide between the things we can do, and the things we should do. If your mother raised you to think a KFC Buffet is on your should do list, she failed you. Maybe the fine print said “brought to you by Porta-John”.

We had planned to stop in Oklahoma City, OK (OKC to all the cool kids)for the night and boondock at Cabela’s. After stopping at Costco for some gas (not quite Buc-ee’s cheap, but pretty cheap) we headed out for some groceries and then to Cabela’s. Somewhere in there I may have taken a few wrong turns. This is why I have 2 GPSs. We arrived at Cabela’s and they were very nice and welcomed us with open arms. I asked if we could park on the south side of the store (blocked from the highway noise) and they let me know that RVs park on the north side. So we parked north side (North side sucks!) and attempted to have a conversation about how nice it was. The highway felt we should not converse. So Mrs. Milddogs called an audible, sent me a text message of the idea cause I couldn’t hear her, and we headed to El Reno Lake RV Park about 38 minutes down the road. Wait, is it still and audible if you can’t hear it? Perhaps she just didn’t want me walking over to Costco and filling the van with more crap!

El Reno Lake RV Park is a municipal park that operates on a first come, first served basis. It costs $20 USD per night. Disclaimer, you can definitely hear the highway from the park, but you are not super close to it. This is a pretty nice spot! We are one of 4 vans all parked next to each other. Good thing we know the secret greeting!

For dinner Mrs. Milddogs whipped up some dips and nacho chips and we had a little sampling. Was lovely and left enough room for all of those deserts I bought at Costco back in Lansing, MI.

Tomorrow we head to Texas! The cold front is coming. We may get to try out the tank heaters I installed and our warm clothes and new blankets.

Oh, we also discovered that those Ikea Tisken suction cups all fail at the exact same age. Three of them failed today. The Ikea site says to just immerse them in “near boiling” water. We shall do that next time we boil some water. I guess it probably is easier if we have the water near us, rather than far away.

We may or may not have cell coverage for the next 3 days. Don’t hate if the posts are late!