Category: nebraska

Omaha Homaha

April 14 – June 1, 2021

RVers like to say, “Home is where you park it,” but heading to Nebraska feels like coming home for us. We pulled out of St. Joseph, Missouri for the relatively short drive to Omaha. It was a quiet Wednesday morning, which was good as we blocked three lanes of traffic to get the trailer backed into Charlotte’s grandma’s driveway.

Mid-April was a bit sooner than we had initially planned on arriving, but with Charlotte’s arm still broken, we decided to skip some site seeing and spend some extra time in town.

Our RV’s first snow!

We ended up staying in town for seven weeks, which gave us time to see friends and family.

We had a few celebrations, including my dad’s birthday.

We hosted Mother’s Day.

And we threw Izzy an early birthday party since we would be back on the road on the actual date. She ended up having two parties in the same day! One in the morning with some of her friends and another one in the evening with family.

We rented a bounce house for the kids.
The piñata was a hit. Izzy and her friends got very excited when encouraged to hit something with a bat.
Izzy received some great birthday cards from her friends.
She got the Nerf gun she really wanted.

We also got to see a couple of families we made friends with out on the road, when they were on their way through town. We even hosted a small birthday party for one of the dads.

Izzy was excited to show one of her friend the playground at Aksarben Village we used to walk over to.
Snack breaks are important.

Izzy also got to spend quality time with her grandparents.

Catching rainbow trout with Grandpa and MorMor at Two Rivers State Park.
Watching Grandpa clean the catch.
Holding some earthworms found while gardening with Lolo and Lola.
Bubble guns with MorMor.

Here’s some more stuff that happened too.

A treat from eCreamery for good behavior at the doctor’s office. I can’t remember why, but Charlotte is holding the cone (maybe to more efficiently direct the eating towards melty areas) and I got to told her hair so it wouldn’t fall into the ice cream.
Playground at Standing Bear.
Izzy learned how to use a cassette player. She also learned about CDs and records.
Sitting in Grandpa’s convertible.
Riding the chairlift at Grandma’s house.
Izzy’s first Power Wheels ride.

In one of our bigger (in terms of both size and price) Costco impulse purchases, we snagged a display model inflatable canoe for a nice discount.

We got to learn how to deflate it in the parking lot.
Out for it’s maiden voyage on Standing Bear lake.

Izzy and Charlotte also took a quick trip down to Kansas City with MorMor to get in some shopping at IKEA.

No IKEA visit is complete without some meatballs.
Izzy really loves staying in hotels..

In addition to all this fun, Charlotte and I also tackled some RV projects. It’s quite a bit easier to work on things in the rig when you’re not also trying to live in it.

I installed this 200 watt solar panel, a Victron charge controller, a couple of circuit breakers, a cutoff switch, and a battery monitoring shunt and display. Later, I replaced the lead acid battery that came from the factory with a 100 amp hour lithium battery.

Thanks to Dan for bringing over a good ladder and helping me get the panel onto the roof and mounted.

I also upgraded quite a few components on the trailer suspension as we were slightly over the rated weight limit. I installed higher rated bearings, bigger leaf springs, a new equalizer with crossmember, and connected everything with new heavy duty shackles and wet bolts.

Thanks to Dave for loaning me these jackstands and a floor jack to go with them.
Great grandpa’s old mechanic’s creeper really came in handy.

Charlotte lightened up the interior by painting almost all of the cabinets, and removed the drawers from the bunk room and replaced them with with a keyboard and mouse tray as well as a spot to park the desk chair. They new setup works really well and is probably a better than what we had in the house.

Thanks to Andy for help with the big board shown here.

All too soon, it was time to head out. While we would have liked to have stayed longer, getting to a wedding meant we had a firm deadline. We’ll cover that one next time. Until then, see you down the road.

2 Comments

Categories: nebraska rv adventures

Tags: , , , ,

It’s just that we’re on our way to Little Rock

Finally, a city with plenty of songs to choose from. I think the fact that you can easily rhyme the word “rock” has something to do with it. For some reason though, all of these songs about Little Rock are not terribly positive. Our man Hayes Carll here is singing about making his way down to Little Rock to see his baby, and he creepily implies that he’s not going to take no for an answer. Lee Ann Womack sings about escaping from someone as she drives her weird CGI Jeep out of Dallas and A Little Past Little Rock. Collin (née Bubba) Wray has a song about starting a new sober life in Little Rock selling VCRs at Walmart. Even Reba’s song titled Little Rock is sad even though it’s not actually about the city, but her wedding ring and loveless marriage. If all of these songs are to be believed, it seems Little Rock is not really a place you set out to visit, but rather a place you just end up at.

This is pretty much what happened to us. Little Rock wasn’t exactly on our list, but it was on our way as we continued to make it back to Omaha. We spent just two nights there, but managed to pack in plenty of adventure. Our initial plans were to just breeze through on a quick overnight stay, but at some point we realized the park we had booked was very unique, so we added a night so we could have a full day to explore.

We stayed at Downtown Riverside RV Park, which is located right on the Arkansas River. This was our first RV park inside a city and we were a little worried about navigating the surface streets with our rig. It wasn’t too bad though, and we made it to the park and backed our RV almost right up to the water.

That evening, we went for a sunset walk and checked out the nearby pedestrian bridge.

The next morning we set out on foot to explore Little Rock. We crossed the bridge and walked past the (closed for pandemic) Clinton Presidential Library.

Ol’ Slick Willy must own a ton of books to necessitate such a large building to keep them all.

Our first stop was a nature center run by the state Game & Fish Commission. They had lots of native animals (live and taxidermized) as well as some cool displays.

Then, it was time for some fancy donuts and coffee.

We took them to the riverside park to enjoy.

On the way, we passed this Korean-style gate. The gate and garden behind it are dedicated to a Taekwondo grandmaster. Being a blackbelt herself, Charlotte had to stop and pose for a photo.
Sadly, these weren’t great donuts. They were expensive, though!

Izzy didn’t even finish her donut. She was too distracted by the amazing playground we were sitting next to. It didn’t have any traditional equipment, but was a series of concrete tubes, tunnels, ladders, and large rocks built into the hillside right next to the river. Izzy loved it. It was easy for her to escape and hide from us in these small spaces we didn’t want to venture into, which just added to her enjoyment. She had an amazing time running and climbing around.

Before too long it was time for lunch. We had to promise Izzy we’d come back to the park in order to get her to leave. We walked several blocks to a German beer hall with a nice beer garden.

Wurst and spätzle for Charlotte.

After lunch, as promised we went back to the park. Once sufficiently worn down, we started the long walk back to the RV. On our way out we found a piece of the city’s namesake rock.

If this is just a section, the original rock must not have actually been very little.

The next morning it was time to hit the road again. We left Little Rock headed for Branson, Missouri. Rural Arkansas was pretty, but some of the people living out there are so openly racist they advertise it on their billboards. Luckily, we didn’t need to stop anywhere near there and arrived without incident at Treasure Lake RV Resort.

We had decided to get back to Omaha quickly, so once again we had just a two night stay. While Charlotte was working, Izzy and I went out to run some errands and do a bit of exploring. We found a dinosaur “museum”. It was basically just a small retail building that had been converted to display some life-sized and realistic looking plastic dinosaur statues under poor lighting (maybe why they looked realistic?). It wasn’t a long tour, but Izzy did enjoy seeing the dinosaurs. Sadly, we were staying kind of out of season for Branson, so Andy Williams and Yakov Smirnoff didn’t have any shows, but we did drive past Yakov’s theater.

This T-Rex was the star of the show.
Izzy doing her best impression of the “overbite-a-saurus” hanging from the wall.

Leaving Branson, we resumed our drive north. A missed exit allowed us to take a nice tour of the west side of Kansas City before we stopped for the night in St. Joseph.

Horsies!

The next day we had a quick drive into Omaha and managed to back the rig into Charlotte’s grandma’s driveway.

Omaha Homaha.

We had made it! After nine months away, it was good to be back in Nebraska.

See you down the road.

2 Comments

Categories: arkansas missouri nebraska rv adventures

On the Road Again

Willie Nelson - On The Road Again (Official Audio)

Back in April when we last provided an update, we had been parked at the same RV park in southern California since the start of March, with plans of staying a few more weeks. With the daily high temperature starting to regularly climb into the mid-90s, we were happy to finally roll out on May 1. Our destination was Charlotte’s Grandma’s house in Omaha over 1,600 miles away.

Normally when we’re pulling our home and nearly all of our worldly possessions down the highway, we don’t like to rush. Drive times of four hours or less per day and multi-day stops between drives are what we prefer. But with a lot of coronavirus-related uncertainty still in the air, we decided our best course of action would be to get to Omaha as quickly as we dared. This meant five straight driving days with four overnight stops along the way.

Every morning, Charlotte and I would work to empty the tanks, unhook the RV from electricity, water, and sewer, prep a cooler lunch, gather lots of snacks, pack everything away securely so it doesn’t break, bring in the slides, remove the chocks, check the tires, check the hitch, and then hitch up the truck and trailer before we would hit the road. Of course, the whole process is reversed upon arriving at the destination for the evening. It made for some long days.

Still smiling half-way through the trip!
It got a little windy during the drive!

We were thankful though to be hauling a fully self-contained bathroom behind us. We could stop wherever there was room to park, and never had to use a public restroom. No catching the ‘rona from a dirty shared toilet for us!

We made it to Omaha tired, but in one piece, and were able to back our RV into Grandma’s driveway. We feel very lucky that we had a house to live in and a place to park our rig just outside. Grandma moved out back in March, so we had the place to ourselves. Living in a house brought some nice things back into our lives, like a dishwasher, a big fridge, and and even an extra fridge and freezer in the garage. We were able to shop at Costco again! We stocked up on all sorts of beverages and ice cream bars which we never had room for in the RV. At the same time though, we missed our RV and all the little things we had done in order to make it our home.

We bought a pool since we had a backyard to put it in. Izzy loved it.

We stayed in the house for over three months. While we were there, Izzy got to spend a lot of quality time with all of her grandparents, we threw a small family party for Izzy’s fourth birthday, we managed to arrange a few socially distanced backyard visits with friends, and we spent plenty of time working on the RV. Charlotte finished a lot of projects inside, putting up new decorations, coming up with better ways to organize and store our stuff, and prepping Izzy’s room and bed with the hope of actually getting her to sleep in there. Charlotte has promised to write her first blog post showing off all her hard work, hopefully sometime soon. I focused on maintenance items, like flushing out the water heater and re-greasing the trailer axle bearings.

Izzy helping to wash the rig.

Over the course of our stay in the house, we moved quite a bit of our stuff out of the RV and into the house. Moving back into the RV and cleaning up the house before we left was quite a chore and took much longer than we anticipated! Thanks again to my parents for helping out and keeping Izzy entertained and out of the way during the process.

We hit the road again on Sunday, August 9, heading for Forest City, Iowa, which is just a couple hours north of Des Moines. We stayed at a very nice RV park located on a small lake. The park has a single cabin available to rent, and we managed to book it for a few days so Charlotte’s parents could come out and join us. Izzy was excited to get to spend more time with her MorMor and Grandpa, and Charlotte and I were happy to finally share our RV lifestyle in-person.

While we were there we got in some fishing, some kayaking, some campfires, and caught a lot of gorgeous sunsets.

Reeling in her first catch.
Touch da fishy. A little hybrid striped bass.

We stayed at the park for another week after MorMor and Grandpa had to head home. One day we visited nearby Pilot Knob state park. We had a picnic lunch, went for a hike around rare Iowa bog, and climbed the tower located at the top of Pilot Knob (for some reason hills were called knobs back in the 1920s).

Pilot Knob tower.

That’s about the end of our time in Iowa, so I’d better wrap up this post. It feels good to be back out and about in the RV and to have adventures to share. I will try to keep updates coming a bit more frequently. But until then, we’ll see you down the road.

Categories: arizona california iowa kansas nebraska new mexico

Tags: ,