Hello from Arrowhead Point RV Park close to El Dorado, MO

Hello from Arrowhead Point RV Park  close to El Dorado, MO

Wednesday Evening   April 10, 2013   (Fourth travelogue of this trip).

Before we get into this travelogue post, I just had to publish one more picture from the Blytheville rally.  The photo was taken by Stan Holter during the rally.  It is a beautiful photo that could have easily been taken 60 years ago.

Stan Holter's Amazing Photo of the Blytheville Greyhound Terminal

We are at the Arrowhead Point RV park (map).  We chose to stay here for three nights so that we could dump our holding tanks, get water and generally relax and not worry about running the generator.  This location was midway between two activities that we had planned.

The first was a visit with a friend of Pats from her very early days.  Linda and Pat grew up together and have kept in touch all these years.  We drove to Linda and Leonard's house in Roach, MO.  It is a beautiful house right on The Lake of the Ozarks.  We had visited them in the same general area a few years ago, but they have built a new house.  While Linda and Pat caught up on old times, Leonard and I went down to their dock and I got to watch him do some fishing.  We then took his “gator” type ATV for a ride around the area.  Even though the trees are not yet leafed out, it is a beautiful area.   We ended the day with a fun dinner at a local bar/restaurant.  Without question, they are great hosts.

Today was our genealogy day.  Pats Grandfather was born in this general area and a host of his relatives are buried in various cemeteries within about a 60 mile radius of our RV Park.  Last year, after our Eagles International rally, we spent a bit of time in the area, but wanted to do some more research.  We had planned to go the the library in Butler, MO.  Pat had contacted them prior to our trip and the genealogy expert had done some research.  This was her day off, but she left some great material for Pat to review. In addition, the head librarian was of great help in locating additional material and making a couple of contacts for us.

We had also planned to visit three cemeteries.  The weather was very rainy and cold, but we were able to make our planned visits.  One of the cemeteries was the burial location for Pat's grandfather's grandparents.  We also visited another cemetery where her grandfather's parents were born.  Wonder family history.

Tomorrow we head to Iowa – we hope.  They have a prediction of some snow (part of the storm that dumped snow and cold in the Denver area yesterday).  Our bus has not proven to have a great deal of traction in slippery conditions.  We will drive as long as we feel safe and stop if there is any doubt.

That is all for now.

Hello again from Greenville, OH

Hello again from Greenville, OH

Friday Morning October 7, 2011 (third travelogue of this trip).

This week has sure gone by quickly. We leave tomorrow.

Pat has been having a ball using the various resources available here. In addition to the great resources at the Garst Museum, she has spent some time at the county records facility looking at old documents. But the really great resource has been the Library. They have a genealogy department. The woman who works there is so very helpful. She is apparently a contract person (low pay, unfortunately), and just loves her job. She has been working directly with Pat and the two of them have made some pretty good progress.

We have again gone to a couple of graveyards. Some folks think that is kind of weird, but it is rewarding to find the markers of our ancestors. Besides that, the graveyards are beautiful in their own way.

I have been spending quite a bit of time on work related efforts. It seems that when we left town, the world discovered that our business exists {big grin}. I have had to process a couple of nice orders for our fire detection and suppression system and have an order for a specialized version for an industrial customer (indeed, all of my orders have been non-RV). That is a great trend. Hope it keeps up.

We are heading to Chattanooga next week to participate in the Bus Conversions Rally (website). I have been working with the Bus Conversions Magazine owner, offering several seminars (including Pat's rubber stamped greeting card seminar) as well as any type of help he needs. I am also scheduled to be a co-presenter of a one day welding workshop (assuming there is sufficient registration). We will arrive a couple of days before the workshops begin and help with the various activities needed to facilitate a rally of this magnitude.

The welding workshop will be a first for me. I am doing the “textbook” presentation and the other person will work with the attendees to do actual hands-on welding. I think it has the potential for being a good session. I have been spending a lot of time pouring over welding books to get the slide presentation developed. I have a lot of welding experience (since I was 15 years old), but I have never tried to “teach” a class.

Our daughter asked about the fall colors. The trees here are just starting to turn and the colors, so far, are great. I think we will hit the best colors in Tennessee. I had mentioned that the weather was rather cold when we got here. It has now gotten pretty nice with daytime temperatures in the high 70s/low80s and nighttime in the mid 40s.

I had noted that we are staying in the campground at the Darke County fairgrounds. I had linked to a satellite view in the last blog and that view shows how extensive the facilities are. Here is the link: (map). There are a large number of barns and facility buildings. The grounds are immaculate. Many years ago, I attended a car show in the '56 Chevy in Hamilton, OH. My brother-in-law and I drove up here to attend a very large steam tractor event. I fell in love with the fairgrounds when we were here and it has been just as neat as I had remembered. At least one source says that the fairgrounds is located on 176 acres and has 1000 campsites. The Darke County Fair is said to be among the largest county fair in the US.

Last night and this morning we are trying to catch up on washing. It is sure nice to have the washer and dryer in the bus. That lets Pat do the washing while we relax and do other things. We have 30 amp service at the campground, but that is not sufficient to run the dryer. We are running the generator when we do the drying, but that is a very small price to pay for the convenience.

That is all for now.

Hello from Grand Junction, CO

Hello from Grand Junction, CO.

Wednesday morning July 20, 2011 (third travelogue of this trip).

Monday, we went to my favorite breakfast restaurant (Lambs Grill) and had breakfast. We then went to the Mormon Family Library and worked with the wonderful folks who really seem to want to help you with learning more about your family genealogy. At noon, I went over to the Mormon Tabernacle building to hear a wonderful organ recital.

The Tabernacle building architecture (something like a fancy huge quonset hut with rounded ends) looks very much out of place in Temple Square, but the organist demonstrated why - the acoustics are absolutely fantastic. He dropped a pin on a wood block and you could hear it all over the building. The organ is unbelievable. It was originally built in the 1860s by Joseph H. Ridges. It has been updated several times, the largest of which was done in 1948 under the direction of G. Donald Harrison. It has 206 ranks, 11,623 pipes and is organized into 8 divisions played from a five-manual console. Needless to say, the recital was amazing.

After lunch, Pat went back to the library and I did some work in the room. Pat did not make huge headway in her quest to explore our family genealogy, but she did learn about more resources. I suspect she will return to the library in the future.

Yesterday we drove to Grand Junction. Our original plan was to make our typical stop in Green River, UT. However, that stop is quite a bit short of the half way mark and we wanted to get closer to home. We booked a room at the Hampton Inn, but they upgraded us to the Marriott Springhill Suites (same owner). The room is very unique but well done. The hotel is brand new and the folks seem quite friendly. The hotel is on Main street which has undergone a huge reconstruction. There are many sidewalk cafes and great local restaurants. We went to the Rockslide Restaurant and Brewery and had a great meal (ribs) which was neat since we were celebrating my birthday.

We had a lot of fun strolling by the sidewalk cafes. They had a lot of people enjoying their leisurely dinner. However, just as we got to the room, a huge rainstorm (more like a monsoon) hit with almost no warning. We had to wonder what all of the happy diners did

That is all for this trip.

Hello from Evergreen, CO

Friday evening July 31, 2009 (fifth travelogue of this trip)

Well, as you can tell from the subject line, we are home. We made good time and got home Wednesday in the early afternoon.

Now let's finish our catching up on this trip. We mentioned that we did some fun things on our trip home. When I was doing a lot of traveling for Gates in a company van, we found a great little restaurant called the Blue Springs Cafe (http://www.foothipies.com/BSC_Main.htm) about 35 miles west of St. Louis on I 70. As you can tell from the link, they are famous for their “foot high pies”. Years ago, they used to have a billboard on the interstate that made it sound like their chicken was 100 years old. We remember hearing truckers on the CB talking about the “old chicken”. It is a fun restaurant with great pies. We also stopped in Topeka at Pat's Pig for lunch. This is a restaurant we used to eat at when we went to the races in Topeka. It has great barbecue and has quite a racing theme to it. Both brought back fun memories.

Our stop in Russell was also planned based on fond memories. They have a neat oil field museum that I really enjoy touring. It is pretty run down and basic, but it brings back memories of working on experimental belt drives in the “oil patch”.

When I talked about bus vs “normal” travel, one of the main issue for me is the coffee. I am a coffee “snob” and I really don't like the brown water that they call coffee in most of the hotels. I would stop at McDonalds and get coffee that at least has some taste to it {grin}

Let finish this travelogue with discussion about our genealogy research in Greenville, OH. Pat has been doing a lot of work on our family tree, but was not able to learn much about my father's family. I am an only child of an only child and that seems to make it difficult to get much information on that line of the family. We knew that my dad was born in Greenville, so we went to the Garst Museum which has a great genealogy section. We were able to trace quite a few relatives and get some leads for additional research.

The two biggest finds were my grandfather Orion Shepherd's grave (map) . Even more exciting was that we found out quite a bit about my grandmothers family. We were able to learn that her mother lived in a house at 420 Elm street (map) for most of her 96 years. We are sure that my grandmother was born in the house. We were able to contact the folks who own the house (Becky and Terry). Becky showed us the part of the house that she thinks was the original house. In addition to our documentation, they have some documentation that it was the Culbertson house (my grandmothers maiden name). They are the third owners and were excited to find out more history about the house. It turns out that Becky's grandfather built the house adjacent to their house, so they have a lot of family history in that area as well.

I have posted a photo of the house below. We suspect that the front part of the house is the original house (obviously remodeled).

The Original Culbertson house at 420 Elm Street

As a note to our newer readers, I post a link to Google Maps that shows the satellite view. You can zoom in several times to get significant detail. For example, we can see my grandfather's grave stone when we zoom in on that map.

Pat has been able to do some more research on the Internet based on the information we found and now we will have see if our travels will permit us to return to Greenville.

That is all for this trip. We will leave for Salt Lake (Pat: convention; and Jim: Bonneville) next Monday. I will start that travelogue sometime next week.

Hello From Greenville, OH

Hello from Greenville, OH

Saturday evening July 25, 2009 (Second travelogue of this trip)

I am calling this the second travelogue in spite of the fact that we had to detour home and deal with the engine problems in the bus.

This travelogue will be rather short and is intended to let you know that we have survived some rather traumatic issues with our vehicles (yes plural) in the last month. It will take me several blogs to catch up on all that has happened this month. I have not had the time or inclination to do any posting in the past few weeks. As you read this blog and the ones that will follow, you will begin to see why our heads are spinning like tops.

The Fleetwood rally turned out to be a very good rally for us in terms of sales. By most standards it was a small to medium rally (415 coaches) and a small number of vendors (34). I think many of the vendors did reasonably well, which is a hopeful sign that the economy has bottomed out. This was a Fleetwood sponsored rally which almost did not happen. Fleetwood filed chapter 11 and the courts had to approve the expense of the rally. They now are in the final stages of being purchased by a holding company that seems to have their best interest at heart (an all to often false statement). In any case, the Fleetwood folks seemed upbeat as did most of the attendees.

In our last blog I mentioned our engine problems in the bus. We got the bus home without a problem, arriving there on Friday (7/3). Over the next 3 ½ days I removed the engine and took it to the Detroit Diesel Dealer. The results of the engine tear down can be seen at: http://rvsafetysystems.com/Engine_problems.htm. The quote was over $15K. We do not have that kind of money, so we have been scrambling to find acceptable alternatives. More in another blog.

We drove our car to Ohio for a major FMCA rally. In the process we destroyed the engine in our Durango. We then went back home and loaded the PT Cruiser and headed out again. The rally turned out to be a good one for us. More in another blog (detect a theme here?)

We are currently at the Greenville Inn (map). We stopped here to do some genealogy research. We hit the jackpot with some great information (more later).

Well, that is all that I have energy for right now. I will try to fill in all the holes in the next few days.