The Journey

Left Southern Illinois yesterday after enjoying a couple of days of the music festival at the Kaskaskia State Historic Site on the Mississippi. It's nice that the people of the Saving Illinois History organization sponsor this event annually.  There were talented people, young and old, providing that melodious escape that we really appreciate. Then we packed up Ferd and Ole Yeller and pointed northeast toward the next stop in Indianapolis.
Choosing the path is part of our process each time we leave a spot.   Moving along is made more interesting by our technological abilities though.    For instance, we prefer to travel the state highways, through small towns, taking in some of the local atmosphere.  So what do we do?  We look at our Streets and Atlas program on the computer and determine how many miles we might want to travel for the day.  Where might the stop be for this night?  We open our websites for overnight stops, or campgrounds, to determine a few options for stopovers.  We may look at our files of past stops stored on the computer...perhaps we look at  other rvers' recommendations or blogs for an idea.  Websites full of various types of rv stops are available to us.

Well, once we are on the road, we can track our way on the GPS (That's Tillie, to us.).  There's the option of simply watching the path we are taking, or programming her to a specific destination, if we have one.  Sometimes, we revert to the paper maps.  The old habits still are comfortable when in the midst of a journey. 

But since we have the internet air card, there's the option of taking an alternate path at any moment.  Just turn on the computer and look up a town or a campground that we see along the road.  Our last stop was in a WalMart parking lot in Effingham, Illinois.  We didn't know for sure when we left that morning that we would stop there.  It was a possibility.  As we traveled through the little towns of Pinckneyville and Tamaroa, IL, it wasn't clear where we might stop.  We saw the coming of Fall evident in the fields and on the trees.  It's fun to soak up those sites. Part of this particular trip was on the Old National Road, US40, where we were able to see pumpkins for sale and slow down through the tiny towns.    When it comes right down to the lifestyle, though, just moving along the pathways is an important ingredient to the overall experience.  Yesterday's journey is always the one to remember.