I can’t believe it’s already been a month since we left on our 14 month road trip across the USA driving from Minnesota to Florida. A lot has happened that we want to fill you in on, but first and foremost – yes, we are still alive and no, we haven’t gotten sick of each other just yet. 😉
As we sort of expected the first month presented a few obstacles, starting with winter weather. We had originally planned to leave on Monday, February, 5th, but woke up that morning to a forecast for 6 inches of snow in Iowa. After a little deliberation, we decided we’d rather be safe than sorry, so we pushed out our start date until the following day. Good thing we waited! When we drove through Iowa the next day, we saw more than 25 cars stuck in the ditch from the previous day’s snowstorm. Luckily, we made it through to St. Louis, MO with no problems.
Neither Max nor I had been to St. Louis, so we were fortunate to have family there to stay with and be our tour guides around the city. We did the obligatory Gateway Arch tour which provided some amazing views of the city, then ate lunch and had a few cold ones at the Anheuser Busch brewery.
Our plan after leaving St. Louis was to spend a couple nights in Nashville and mosey our way down to Florida; however we scrapped that given our delayed start and seeing that Nashville temperatures were still dipping below freezing at night. Our Winnebago travel trailer “Big Red” is a 3 season trailer, so the furnace doesn’t work so well when it dips below freezing.
From St. Louis we drove to Atlanta and boondocked at a petting zoo/animal farm for our first night in Big Red. It was in the mid-40s when we arrived that night, so we piled the blankets on our bed, turned the heat on and hoped for the best. When we woke up the next morning it was freezing inside as the heat had stopped working due to the low temps! We made some coffee and oatmeal to warm ourselves up and then hit the road for Florida. Somewhere on the interstate between Atlanta and Jacksonville, someone may have found a nice little present as we realized our bumper caps (that hold our RV disposal tube inside the bumper) had fallen off and along the way our sh*t tube flew out…time to get a new one!
