Wednesday (Jul 27)
I eventually emerge with my bags from in my quiet, dark downstairs hideaway. I am planning to go directly to a coffee place in downtown Corydon, a four minute drive, so all there is to do is say goodbye to my excellent cousin Mildred, named for my mother Mildred Real.
I’m pretty stoked to be back in my groove, soaking up wifi and planning the next couple of days.
Drove 20 miles to the Overlook Inn, a local landmark. The cool restaurant in the cool town of Leavenworth Indiana high above a bend in the Ohio River. I ate an expensive, filling meal and quite enjoyed it! There is a pub downstairs.
Really pretty countryside in this part of Southern Indiana. Even Crawford County looks prosperous down here. Little ole Route 62 runs parallel and plays cat and mouse with I-64 for about 30 miles. When it dips south I leave it and pass through Santa Claus Indiana, which you may have heard of. It’s not just for Christmas time, let me tell you. The place is huge! It’s got a full-on amusement park that was packing ’em in here in peak summer. A couple of huge deeeluxe RV Parks for the kind of deeeluxe folks that want to come here.
By the time I get to Evansville I am pretty much done with curvy country roads. I set my van clock and my camera ahead(!) an hour and aim for the state park.
WHUFU page for: Harmonie Campground
Way overpriced and has stupid rules.
The park borders the Wabash River, but the campground itself is miles from the river.
There is a public swimming pool that is an additional charge on top of the camping fee.
tonight:
Checkout time is 11, which is an insult.
Not pleased with Indiana State Parks. The web site gave the impression it would be $14 to stay here but it’s $24.61. The site is nice enough, but the shower is pretty poor. I get critical when I think I am overpaying. Worst indignity of all, check-out time is 11am, which is really a bush league way to run a campground.
Thursday
It’s becoming clear that my van design is not built for summer in the east. I kept the ventilation fan going till dawn, so I felt ok. But between the lack of bug-proofing and the lack of a/c at night, it’s just not that much fun to hang out around here.
New Harmony is a pretty cool town, but has the same pinched, cheap-ass ‘hold a nickel between your cheeks’ feel as last night’s campground. The coffee and sandwich restaurant folks were the only normal people I encountered. The Visitors Center was kind of stupid, costs $3 to walk up the stairs, and the employees seemed to enjoying saying no a lot more than yes. They do rent golf carts for tooling around the town looking at 1800’s Utopian architecture. Also, there is a perfectly good bridge over the Wabash River to Illinois that is closed because this county and the corresponding county in Illinois got in a pissing contest and are too cheap for fix it. Oh Republicans …
Easy drive today. The landscape since the Badlands has been corn fields alternating with soy bean fields forever. Today it was broken up by the appearance of little ponds between fields. Not sure if that’s because it’s been raining so much lately or if that’s just the terrain, but there they are.
Went to Kroger’s, the supermarket of my youth! Big ole thunderheads were gathering when I went in. I heard a lot of storm noises while I was shopping, and sure enough it was pouring when I came out. I’m only a few miles away from this large sprawling Wildlife Refuge where I hope to stay tonight.
WHUFU page for: Crab Orchard Campground
real nice find! Crab Orchard is a pretty big place, with four campgrounds.
The other campgrounds have full hookups for the big boys and cost more. But E Loop is the oldest and has become the bastard stepchild in the corner. Electric only inside the loop, no hookups outside. Its bathroom is kinda gross, but hey, $5 for overnight and a shower ain't bad.
Very happy in my spot. My neighbor says the rain beats the mosquitoes down so they aren’t so active for a while. Whatever the reason, this is my second warm midwestern night in a row without bugs and I am diggin it!
Most of the picnic tables for the tent sites are pretty far out in the grass, and I am afraid I’ll get stuck, so I choose the one closest to pavement, which is also the one next to the Loop E boat launch (which no one uses). I’m parked about 30 feet away from a panoramic view of Crab Orchard Lake – pretty cool!
I was thinking about setting up bed when a pretty powerful thunderstorm passed through. I turned off all the lights and moved to the drivers seat to watch it move across the lake, which again, is 30′ away, right in front of me with no trees or even bushes in the way. An unforgettable, mildly epic experience!
I was brought down from my weather high when I moved back to the sofa and a pile of water dumped on my head! It seems that the angle of the wind (or something) had caused a lead around my rear vent window. I took a couple of pics for the van dudes, but it hasn’t happened since so I am pretending it never happened.
Friday
Hot and muggy this morning, still not into it. I have a brainstorm and realize that if I leave this spot and move my act over to C loop there’s a beach and the bathroom is supposed to be not so disgusting. I do that, and have a great morning. I slather myself with sun block, swim, and wash it right off afterwards.
After that I’m off to the NWR Visitors Center. According to what I’m used to from the west, this a very strange NWR. Now only is there commercial camping (hook-ups, showers), but a large chunk of the area is off limits to visitors. I find that it is a General Dynamics facility doing some kind of classified military manufacturing … in the middle of a wildlife refuge. Weird. Wiki tells me it was a high-explosives munitions plant in World War 2.
On the ranger’s advice I take the long way to Carbondale, through City of Giants State Park. Nice drive, but I didn’t see no giants.
My Carbondale coffee place was called Common Grounds – a pretty common name it seems. It was adequate for the purpose except for the Christian rock playing softly in the background. That stuff is soooo awful. It messes with my mood a little. We had our daily downpour while I was inside.
Thence to a Brazilian restaurant (hooray for college towns!) where I had yummy Brazilian fried fish with a Brazilian interpretation of mashed potatoes, then back to the state park to camp for the evening, or such was the plan anyway…
The nice snake lady at the Giant City Visitors Center told me yesterday that they have tent sites for a good price. Sadly, when I get there the sort campground functionary tells me that they really are for tents only, not for the likes of me. I still pissed off about Indiana two nights ago, so am not gonna do a ripoff state campground when I have other options, so back to one of the other three NWR campgrounds for me.
I don’t know why I thought the campground would be easy to find, nothing else has been around here, the way the roads branch and rejoin around lakes with almost no road signs to give on a clue.
WHUFU page for: Devil's Kitchen Lake Campground
If it were 30° cooler, this would be spectacular, but it's just too hot tonight. It's set up as a tents-only area on a little peninsula on the lake, but there's no one else here, so I'm hanging in the parking lot.
The bathroom (with shower!) seems to be of recent construction and is very nice. The stifling heat and stillness became kinda neat after a while...
tonight:
If it were 30° cooler, this would be spectacular, but it's just too hot tonight. It's set up as a tents-only area on a little peninsula on the lake, but there's no one else here, so I'm hanging in the parking lot.
The bathroom (with shower!) seems to be of recent construction and is very nice. The stifling heat and stillness became kinda neat after a while...
It is perfectly still and at least 300% humidity, and sweat is rolling off me just sitting. On the up side, this afternoon’s downpour brought the temperature down a little and there aren’t very many bugs. There’s no sun … there’s no clouds either really, just a thick soup of humidity where the visual field just kind of fogs over in the distance.
On the other side of my little peninsula on Devil’s Kitchen Lake there evidently is some kind of picnic area / boat launch where I could hear a lot of activity. It sounded as if it were coming right to my area, but eventually I internalized the fact that there’s 60′ of lake water between me and ther hubbub, and was able to ignore it as a far-off distraction.
Saturday
Just shows, you never know. This place turned out to be a really pleasant place to stay! Having it all absolutely to myself helped. Also, that nice shower.
Not a single vehicle came down to my area for the eighteen or so hours (6pm to noon) I was parked here. I had perfect privacy on a Friday night and Saturday morning.
Do the one mile City of Giants hike. Kinda meh. The “giants” are just 30′ tall sandstone(?) cliffs that sometimes erode into columns.
People are odd here. The music is all country, or even worse Christian country. The women are super standoff-ish, like you aren’t allowed to talk to them unless you address their husbands first. But then the husbands ignore me too, so maybe they just don’t like the cut of my jib.
There was a little bit of excitement at the bridge over the little creek that starts the loop hike. A family of what I think were mud daubers (wasps/hornets with attitude) were quite upset with all the extra Saturday traffic over the bridge that they call home. I got the adrenaline rush from the sudden realization that that’s not just any annoying bug, that’s a wasp and he has company. I got a mild sting on my neck before I swatted them off. On the way back I sprinted over the bridge. After that I tried to warn a couple of groups and got the “why the fuck are you talking to me” vibe, so I shifted to fuck ’em, and just hung out at the water fountain and watched the show for a while.
Then it was time to leave this odd little area of southern Illinois where I surprised myself by spending three kind of interesting days. South through the town of Anna to Cape Girardeau, where I crossed the mighty Mississippi into Missouri. I stopped at a Burger King for my daily wifi, then joined I-55 for a few miles to take me to Route 72 to the area of my campground:
WHUFU page for: Silver Mines Campground
Signage is very poor ==> hard to find. I ended up going to the river level loop with hookups and the camp host who directed me up the hill to the non-hookup sites on the bluffs.
Nice big sites. There's a trail down to the swimming hole by the old dam. Very cool!
tonight:
Signage is very poor ==> hard to find. I ended up going to the river level loop with hookups and the camp host who directed me up the hill to the non-hookup sites on the bluffs.
Nice big sites. There's a trail down to the swimming hole by the old dam. Very cool!
Hot and humid of course, but not so bad my my recent standards. I guess I’m acclimating. The excitement here is the trail down the hill to the old dam on the St Francis River, where there turns out to be a real nice swimming hole. Just perfect really, except that the water isn’t as clean as one might wish. Really refreshing though…
Deployed the hammock for only the second time on the trip. So easy, so fun!