A few days camping

Since leaving Kansas, we went through St. Louis, stayed the night there, at a parking lot with a power hookup, which charged "only" $23 for the luxury of parking on their asphalt (though they did at least have hot showers, which since we didn't have a water hookup, I took advantage of). We did the arch (impressive feat of engineering, with rather ingenious elevator system to get up), and toured briefly, before departing east again.

Delilah travels very well during the day, often amusing her self for hours with puppets, and self-created games, or playing with her old fall-back, the leap frog which she has gotten many hours of amusement from. Unfortunately, apparently on the subconscious side, she is less happy with the travels, and has been having "night terrors" where she will start howling in the night, but she isn't actually awake - eyes closed, sobbing, arches her back if you try to lay her down - inconsolable... Apparently these are common in some kids but new to us. The "good" news (if you can call it that) is that she only does it for a few minutes at a time, but some nights she might wake half dozen times.

Between the waking up with Delilah's hooting, and my returning sinus infection apparently making me snore even more loudly than usual, Barbara hasn't been sleeping too well. Any of you that have been around B when she is more than a few hours shy of her quota of sleep will know that it is an unpleasant world to be in... To mitigate things, we decided to stay last night in a mini-suite in a hotel in Henderson Kentucky (after a run through Illinois, and brief stint in Indiana). The stay went well other than Barbara ended up twisting a leg a bit getting into the pool. After judicious application of healing techniques, it seems to be doing pretty well now, but obviously slowed things down a bit today.

We decided to take just a short drive to Bowling Green Kentucky, and will stay here a few days, to R&R, and do some real "RV Camping" at a KOA here. KOAs are definitely "deluxe" both in their accommodation's, and their price - about $30/night. But they do have full hookups (30A power, water, sewer, cable, optional phone, and wireless (shared though, so slow)), along with a nice play area, walking trails, and optional rentals such as bikes, fishing (catch and release) in a pond, etc.

I've gotten setting up the internet to a science finally, though it still takes about 20-30 minutes to make it all happen. Starts with turning on the GPS to get the LAT/LON, write that down, dialing that into the first program on the computer, which spits out the heading, inclination and skew. Next, you take a compass and start looking at the indicated heading for holes in the tree coverage, which tells you where you can set things up. Then, setting up the tripod, mounting the head, leveling it, then mounting the dish and the horn, wiring it up with the local indicator, dialing in the settings using a secondary compass (since you can't have one near the running dish, or the fields skew it). Hopefully you have long enough cables - if not, add the extension. Now, running back to the computer, configuring (after translating from degrees, minutes to decimal degrees) the sat modem, then out to the dish again to aim, tweak, then back to the computer to test... If all is well, you end up with a pretty reasonable internet connection. We've been able to use our Vonage VOIP phone here (though I can't seem to have it stop forewording calls to B's cell, when it's not on), and have two laptops (his and hers - how romantic) jacked through a router.

Picture of our nerd cabinet with all hardware included for reference. Satellite modem, VOIP box, router, UPS, Phone, host of wall warts, photo and regular printer, way too many cables, and our 20" LCD TV included...


With me doing all the driving, and most of the set up (Delilah helps some :) ), Barbara has been doing most of the cooking. Tonight's repast included Thai rice with shrimp, Basil, Garlic, and peppers, a salad and bread with vegi pate. Not bad for an RV meal I'd say...

Been raining and windy, but staying cozy in our RV. Got an "oil heater" which will supposedly do a better job keeping us warm (instead of hot and cold). Internet service is slower, but still working ok, so can't complain.

We'll be here until Friday AM, then on again. We've given up on Disneyworld for this trip, since B has an awards banquet on the 19th, and would mean a lot of driving between now and then. I'm sure that we will return again and do at least Disneyworld and a cruise, and perhaps some of the southern states that we won't visit on this trip some year in the future...

That's about as much as I can justify pushing out into the digital cosmos today...