You'll get a charge out of this....

6:53 am - Wednesday - April 25th - Lebanon, MO - 51º F, 72% humidity, wind 5 mph out of the north......high clouds with a forecast high of 57º F and rain about mid morning....we will be long gone by then.....no rain forecast at today's destination....St. Louis.

Once again we did not plan to leave Downstream Casino until about mid morning so after I finished writing my daily blog entry we took off on a walk around the enormous parking lot....

.....each lap was about .8 of a mile, so we walked around the lot two times for a total of 1.6 miles.....

.......we covered the 1.6 miles averaging over 3.5 mph burning about 296 caloric units.  While we are moving every day we try to walk every single day just to keep the juices flowing.

By 10:30 am we were ready to roll so I unhooked our electrical and we were on our way to our oh so modest goal of Lebanon, MO.....just 127 miles to the east.  Ultimately we plan to spend a few days in St. Louis, but St. Louis was 286 miles away, and I didn't want to drive that far in one day, so we chose a closer destination.

The drive was quite easy along I-44 which in this section has a lot of gentle rolling hills.  I just set the cruise control on 60 mph and held on to the steering wheel.  We ended up stopping to take a break 3 times in 127 miles, a new record for us.  One of our stops was at a Camping World just east of Springfield, MO.  Camping World is owned by Good Sam, and they are a great resource for anything you might need for your RV.  They also sell RV's, and work on them, but I would never let them work on my Newell.  I've heard nothing but complaints over the years from everyone I have met who has had them work on their RV.

I needed to replace my 50' white water hose as it has been 'done' for a long time.  I wanted to get one just like my 25' white hose, which I also bought at Camping World 6 years ago.  It is still going strong after all these years, and I was hoping they had a 50' version of that hose.....they did!  We picked up a couple of other things (valve stem extenders for my rear dualies, and some tension bars for our cupboards to keep things from falling out after a day of driving).

We were back on the road for the final 40 miles to Lebanon and arrived at the Walmart Supercenter there about 2 pm.  We went inside to order a couple of Subway sandwiches for lunch, and pick up some fruit for the next few days.  Our plan after our late lunch was to get the VW out of the trailer and drive one exit back on I-44 to visit a knife outlet store (Buck, Henckels, etc.), and then directly across the Interstate to a large antique store (Heartland Antiques) which boasted 350 booths.  Unfortunately, when TLE got in the VW to back it out of the trailer she found that the battery was dead as a door nail, so I had to get out my portable charger, turn on the big Kohler genset, plug in the trailer to the Newell, then hook up the charger to the battery to get some charge into it before we tried the 85 amp boost quick start option.  It took about 45 minutes to get the battery up to 56% before we tried to use the 85 amp option and it worked.  The car fired right up and we were on our way to the factory outlet knife store.  As it turned out TLE had forgotten to turn off the XM Radio receiver when we inserted the VW into the trailer in Fontana 8 days prior and it drained the battery.

We didn't find any knives we could not live without, so we headed across the Interstate to Heartland Antiques where we probably spent an hour browsing........we came away with a Mason jar to replace the one TLE broke a couple of weeks ago while we were in Fontana.....$2.50.

As luck would have it there was an automated car wash right across the parking lot from where we are parked where you could get a quick wash for $5, so we ran our filthy VW through the wash, dried her off, and then stowed her back in the trailer before heading inside for the day.  By this time it was almost 7 pm....where did that 5 hours go?

Getting ready to role our wheels in about 30 minutes so I will bid you adieu for now.....thanks for stopping by!

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