Hello from Amana, IA

Hello from Amana, IA

Tuesday Evening; July 1, 2008 (First travelogue of this trip)

We are at the Amana Colonies RV Park (here). More about why we are here later.

I have not posted to the blog since April. We have been quite busy, but that is mainly an excuse. Since the last post, our bus trips have included a trip to Albuquerque to do a system installation, and to the Mountain Park campground in the Poudre River area (here). The latter was for our family vacation. Our three girls and their families (including our eight grandkids) plus our German exchange student (‘81/’82) and her husband were there for at least part of the week.

BTW, the two map locations above can be viewed in either map or satellite formats. For satellite view, you may need to zoom out a bit.

On this trip we left Evergreen on Sunday, June 22. We made overnight stays at the Wal Marts in North Platte, NB and Ankeny, IA. We then proceeded to Mankato, MN where we stayed at Pneumant Systems Inc (http://www.pneumat.com). This is a very neat niche company that makes silo cleaning equipment. They also have excellent technicians/engineers who have installed three of my systems. We were there to install a system in Gary Swaim’s beautiful new Holiday Rambler Navigator. Gary and Karen had a horrendous fire last year and lost both their motorhome and service vehicle (they are vendors and installers of satellite systems – TV and Internet). They are full-timers, so the lost everything! They documented how they dealt with the fire at: http://swaimquest.com/Coach_Fire.aspx). We have gotten to know Gary and Karen over the last year and they are really great folks. I am honored that they chose my system.

This, by far, is the best installation I have seen. Gary is a detail person and we all rose to the occasion (challenge) of doing a top notch job. I will document the installion on my website in the next few days. Gary and I assisted, but the lion’s share was done by two folks at Pheumat.

We left Mankato on Sat. (6/28) and traveled to Diamond Jo’s Casino at exit 214 on I-35 in IA. This was a fun couple of days. Pat got to do a bit of gambling and on Sunday we went to Clear Lake, IA. This is the site where three major entertainers of the 50’s died in a plane crash. They were: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson. The crash occurred in the middle of a corn field and occurred on Feb. 2, 1959. I had looked up the GPS coordinates, but the site was not marked from the road. It turns out that you have to walk a fence line about a half a mile in the corn field to get to a small marker.

Monday we came to this campground. It is the site of a Safari motorhome Rally. I will talk more about it in the next post.

Guess that is all for now.