Wednesday July 29, 2015
We are spending the night at Lake Darling State Park near the tiny town of Brighton, Iowa. We left home at 08:40 EDT and arrived here at 4:00 PM CDT. 8 hrs, 20 min. to drive 414 miles. This agrees with my theory of 2 hrs. per 100 miles. It works every time. We stopped at a rest stop in Indiana, and two in IL. And had one gas stop.
The GPS gave us a scare after crossing into Iowa. It announce a 2 hr. delay because of a road
closure and changed my arrival time from 5:00 to 7:00 in the evening. Marsha got on her phone and found a way
around it, but after that my GPS also offered up the same solution and we got
here when we were supposed to.
We don’t like to take interstates, but there isn’t much
option to cross IL east to west. It is
straight, flat, and boring. We got off
the interstate in Iowa and followed some nice country roads through farmland to
get to this state park. We found this
state park on the map when planning the trip.
We plan on crossing the rest of Iowa tomorrow on route 92, which kind of
parallels I-80.
Tomorrow, our destination is somewhere around North Platte,
Nebraska. I-80 follows the Platte
River. It is basically following the
Oregon Trail, which by the way, is the name of the book I am currently
reading. It is about two brothers who
are repeating the trail from end to end in a covered wagon, pulled by mules.
The state park here is nice, and we usually don’t like state
parks. We have a site right on the
water. When we got here in this 85o
heat, there was a nice breeze blowing off the lake and a nice shade tree on the
site. It didn’t take long for us to set
up our chairs beneath the tree and enjoy the breeze with a cold one.
Made some English muffin burgers on the grill for dinner. This is nice to get off the road early and
have time to relax. Before I was retired
and had a limited time (2 weeks), I would push to get 550-600+ miles per day to
get to our destination and we never had much time to relax before we had to go
to bed so we could leave early so we could get to the next destination early
enough to relax and make something besides a sandwich. Well, we have time now to cut it back to 300
or 400 miles per day because time is not crucial anymore. This all goes back
to the “because I can” theme.
One of the milestones of the day was crossing the
Mississippi River from Illinois into Iowa on this bridge:
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