Hello from Hannibal, MO

Hello from Hannibal, MO

Tuesday Morning June 22, 2010 (ninth travelogue of this trip).

Lots of miscellaneous stuff to catch up on. Our wonderful campground in West Salem, WI was right on the La Crosse River. It looked like a good place to fish, so I bought an out-of-state 4 day license ($24). I guess that is not too bad, but compared to the very reduced fee in CO for folks over 65, it kind of hurt. Worse yet, I never find the time to fish in CO. I did not catch anything, but had a lot of fun.

I talked about how neat the campground was. We were lucky and did not have any close RVs except for the last day. Even that was not bad. The camp hosts even had great rolls and coffee for Fathers Day. We had only planned to say a couple of days, but we enjoyed the area so much that we stayed 7 nights! I have included a photo which does not come close to showing how neat the area was.

I brought my bicycle with me on this trip and have been riding it a bit. Pat got it for me as a gift a few years ago and it is the first high quality bike I have owned. The shifting is flawless! I was able to ride it on some trails in the campground area and it was a ton of fun. Rides were not long, but I still got a bit of exercise.

I mentioned that I had been working on a problem with the bus. It is not a huge problem, but my charge air cooler air flow is not what it should be and it allows the air entering the engine to get hotter than I would like. I built/installed a hydraulic fan system before this trip. That should have solved the problem, but it did not. I have been working with the fan blade supplier and he said that I must have a shroud to make the fan work properly. So, I fabricated one out of fiberglass in the campground (see photo). The photo shows the raw shroud with the fan. I wrapped the fan with cardboard to get the best fit I could, given the situation. The shroud doesn't look all that impressive, but once I got it trimmed up, it looked pretty good. That did not solve the problem completely, so I am doing some more system analysis and working with both the fan manufacturer and the pump/motor manufacture.

When we were touring the upper Mississippi, we saw some strange purple contraptions hanging from trees along the highway. Then we found one in the campground. It turns out that they are bug traps that are mounted in selected Ash trees. It turns out that there is a terrible infestation of Emerald Ash Borer (http://www.emeraldashborer.info/). This threatens ash trees in North America.

We left the campground on Sunday and drove a bit less than 250 miles to a truck stop close to Mediapolis, IA on US 61. We then drove a bit over 100 miles to Hannibal. Normally we enjoy two lane roads, but the two days getting here were not a lot of fun. The trip through Wisconsin was not good at all. The roads were very rough and there was a lot of tight twisty areas. In addition, it rained heavily during parts of both days. Indeed, it has been raining in the Midwest a bunch. All along our journey we saw flooding of the farm fields. The rivers are out of their banks in some areas, and there have been a lot of flash flood warnings. It is probably not bad enough to make the evening news, but the huge number of folks affected are probably really suffering.

We are staying in Injun Joe Campground (map). We will have more about Hannibal in the next installment.


That is all for now.