Had a super night’s sleep and woke up to a beautiful cool morning at Kamp Indy. Max and I went for a long walk around the pond/lake and even visited the dog park — he got a good run! Here’s where we went and a fun sign.

Quick breakfast and then off to get fuel and head to Chicago area. A straight shot up I-65, with a time zone change expected as we crossed from Indiana into Illinois. We saw incredible wind turbines while still in Indiana. So graceful and HUGE. Mesmerizing, even if not much wind today.

We got to our destination around noon – – Camp Bullfrog, one of the many areas of Cook County Forest Preserves. We’ll be here until Monday AM – our outpost for traveling into Chicago. (About a 45 minute drive, and the closest campground to the City.) These preserves are pretty amazing – 350 miles of trails, 70,000 acres, six nature centers, five campgrounds, 40 rivers and lakes, and 10 golf courses. We had no idea!

Our campground is a mixture of tent/camper sites, with a huge lake for fishing and kayaking. We’ve got electric hook-up and are using our own water/refuse tank. Our site is just across the street from the lakeside path, and we have lots of families in tents around us. It’s a truly happy neighborhood! Max and I have already had a couple of good jaunts. Definitely a nice place to chill.

And chill we did after lunch! All three of us sacked out for a bit of recharge and it was nice not to be on the run with a long drive today. When we woke up, John had the hankering for pizza and we headed out to Falco’s Pizza & Pasta, about 15 minutes away. What a cool place! We expected a regular pizza restaurant – WRONG! As soon as the door opened, we heard and saw that we were in a wowzah Friday night, rockin’ (can you say LOUD!), cozy, after work Chicago pizza bar/joint. It was tremendous! So many happy people – with laughter, beer, pizza and pure joy just filling the place. You order at the counter, get your own drinks from the bar, and they bring you your food. I got a little mozzarella, tomato slices and basil pizza. John got a sausage (delish) and mushroom pizza. We both added a side house salad just to be a bit healthful. I loved the thin, crispy crust. If we lived here, we’d make this a regular go-to on a Friday or Saturday.

After dinner, came home to sit outside and listen to the nature and family fun sounds, and take in the campfire aromas. A most wonderful end to a really nice day. Think we’ll sleep with the windows open tonight – heavenly!

PS Max is being really, really good. Has taken residence on the front dash, observing everything that happens. He’s doing well in learning not to bark at everyone/everything. He is such a smart and fun pup. He’ll probably add his two-cents to this blog in the next couple of days.

Above you see GoGo, ready to roll this morning around 11. Sunny, 76 degrees. So the big question is: what kind of a day will it be? Is it “Third Time’s a Charm” (A good day!) or “What happens twice, happens thrice?” (another uh -oh day!). If this were a TV commercial, you could place a Kalshi bet and maybe win millions! Read on to see how it all plays out!

The plan for the day is simple: drive mostly on I-75 from Kentucky through a bit of Ohio and in/out/into Indiana. Destination: Kamp Indy (or “Lake Haven Retreat”) in Indianapolis. Should take between 3 and 4 hours max.

So…almost a half hour into the trip, there is a sign for “The Ark Encounter.” John had heard of it and said let’s go check it out. I was clueless – no idea what this might be. Well, as we say in the South, “Butter my butt, and call me a biscuit!”, it’s actually an ark built to the Bible’s specs and crafted mostly by Amish carpenters. It’s 510 feet long, 85 wide and 51 high (I’m not sure of the cubit dimensions, but I think they used about 20 inches for 1 cubit, and it’s supposed to be about 300x50x30. Also, a cubit is the measurement from your elbow to the top of your middle finger – so it varies from person to person. But you already knew that, right?!?)

The Ark was built in 2016 and cost over $100 million: $62 million in bond money and $36 million in private donations. It is the vision of Ken Ham, who is a creationist and takes the Bible literally – he debated Bill Nye (the Science Guy) in 2014 at Ham’s “Creation Museum.” A great percentage of the Ark Encounter is exhibits putting forth the creationist philosophy and other conservative Christian ideas. [Note: it was a bit much for me, and way too much for John, but we still found the whole thing fascinating, and the ark itself is magnificent. The top floor is the living quarters for Noah and his family. The second floor has the various workshops. The first floor houses animals and storage.

There also are relics from Biblical times, recreations of the Dead Sea Scrolls and pages from the Guttenberg Bible. I was most awestruck by Sebastian Adams’ “Classic Time-Line of World History: a Chronology of Ancient, Modern and Biblical History.” It is an accordion style fold-out 23 feet long and over a yard tall, and first published in 1871! I bought one of the reproductions just to share with grandkids and church pals and history buffs — and to pour over (yes, it folds out the whole 23 feet!) . It goes from 4004 BC to 1870 and US President Hayes.

If you ever are near Williamstown, KY, and you get the chance and are curious, we recommend you GO! It is the largest wooden structure in the world and really incredible. Check out these photos and see a bit for yourself!

That last photo is Max waiting in the window of GoGo for us to return from the Ark. It didn’t take 40 days and nights, but it did take almost 3 hours!

So! Happy to report that we had no mishaps today! Just another serendipitous diversion to a really interesting place! Then got to our campground, had burgers on the grill and fresh corn (yes, there’s a Kroger here!), watched Ted Lasso, and turned in. And so there was morning, and there was evening on the third day…and it was good.

Today turned out to be wacky, wacky, wacky. A five-hour drive turned into a ten-hour drive. Lexington became Georgetown. There is an actual birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken and we went there. Poor Buskaroo has been skuffed up pretty bad. Construction crews can work miracles. Corbin, Kentucky has nice cops. There are no mosquitos in Georgetown, Kentucky in the evening if you want to sit a spell outside. Tennessee and Kentucky have nice interstates. Too much to tell – here’s an executive summary of the highs and lows.

We started the day with beautiful NC and Tennessee mountain scenery. Amazed at the miracles the highway construction folks are doing post-Helene to rebuild I-40 yet again. Awesome, even if it means major traffic slow-downs. And you can get Moonshine at a regular gas station near Knoxville.

Traffic slow-downs also happen in Kentucky! Slow-enough on I-75 to take Max out to pee without having to pull over! And yes, slow enough (3 mph) to have a truck try to wedge into our lane and apparently not see Buskaroo being towed. A bummer of a crash – and we became a slow-down on top of a slow-down. But the Corbin police were very nice. (Did you know that in Kentucky you don’t have to show your driver’s license to the other driver!?!?!)

But! The silver lining was that in our slow-motion drive, we saw a sign for the birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Colonel Sanders museum. Pretty darn cool! And, maybe because it’s the original site of the original secret-recipe KFC, the chicken was the best ever. Crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside. Pure yum. And that Colonel was quite a man — not only did he choose the perfect 11 spices, he was the champion of the pressure cooker. Who knew? The whole place was a serendipitous piece of Americana. We loved it!

And after all this — the good, the bad and the ugly — we opted to forego our original plans to stay at the Waveland State Historic Site in Lexington (it closed at 4 and we were way past that). We moseyed onward to Whispering Hills RV Park in Georgetown, just the other side of Lexington. A beautiful park, and we got a 60′ site with full-hook-up: sewer, electric and water. Only fitting after our bizarro day. My primary take-away of August 26? John Lytvinenko is amazing. No matter what came our way, he handled it. Same as he did yesterday. Look up HERO in the dictionary and you’ll find his picture. I am one lucky woman!

Now we can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings…

And we’re off! Remember that old joke/story–good news, then bad news, then ya-da-ya-da? Well, that might be today’s theme!

We started out the morning at home, everyone getting ready to roll: that’s good news!

Uh oh – bad news! Doc called in prescription too late last night and so we had to wait for the pharmacy to open! Delay!

Good news! Pharmacy hurried and we were able to hit the road by 10:30! A beautiful day – temp 76, nice and sunny!

We had beautiful scenery to/past Siler City — and stopped in Greensboro for a take-out salad lunch — which we ate in the comfort of our own house car. Then back on the road, headed west.

Bad news at 1:30 PM. We lost turbo power and couldn’t accelerate over 30 mph or so — looked like a hose problem that was repaired after our last long trip. Or so we thought. We needed to find a diesel engine place quickly!

Good news! Google maps showed us a place just 10 minutes away.

Bad news! The engine was so hot they couldn’t get to the problem. Had to wait about 2 hours. Good news! It was still great weather, so John unhooked the car (Buskaroo) and we drove around Kernersville for a bit. Found a nice park where Max could explore and do his own business…

Great news! The work was done at 4:45 and we got back on the road. A super work team that really knows their diesel engines! They said the folks who did the original repair did not do it correctly.

And I’m happy to say, the rest of the day’s journey was all good news: nice ride to the mountains (see photo at the top of the page), GoGo made it up the Old Fort mountain all the way to the Continental Divide with no problems at all. Then just a bit more of a drive to our home for the night: Cracker Barrel in Asheville. A nice home-cooked (kind of) meal, then back to GoGo, where Max was sleeping away. And we all tucked in for the night – cool enough that we could turn off the generator/AC and just have the fresh mountain air and night-sounds lull us to sleep under a pretty full(ish) moon. An adventurous first day!