One of the goals of our trip was to visit friends and family in Indiana, which is 1,100 miles from Denver. We broke the trip up into four legs with stops in Wakeeny, KS, Kearney, MO, and Jacksonville, IL. Angie once again found some cool campgrounds. In Wakeeny, we stayed at a private campground called Rosie’s, located behind a motel with a bar and grill complete with an outdoor patio.. We met some nice folks, including one couple who are snowbirds with places in Olympia and St. Simons Island, GA.
In Kearney, we stayed at Watkins Mill State Park, a well-maintained park with a large lake with a swimming beach and a paved bike trail. Angie took her first bike ride since her accident last summer that required two surgeries and on-going rehabilitation. It was a nice re-introduction. The path was flat and mostly shaded, although there were a lot of bumps and holes in the pavement.
We got a bad surprise when we took the bikes off the rack, which is mounted on the tongue of the trailer hitch. We discovered the front window of our trailer had a big crack in it. One wheel on the inboard bike had slipped off the rack allowing one of the pedals to impact the window. We weren’t sure about the root cause. We did have to brake pretty hard once that day when someone merged poorly onto a freeway which had been narrowed to one lane in our direction. Also, a week prior, we added a rain cover over the bikes and wondered if tightening the straps on the cover and lifted the wheel off the rack. We also wondered if we had left the window open and it might have bounced up and contacted the pedal. We considered ourselves fortunate that the double-pane window would still be waterproof, since the inner pane was intact. We put duct tape on the outer pane, tightened up the bikes and cover and hit the road again.
Stopping for gas in Illinois, we were shocked to see that the cracks in the window had spread dramatically and that the inner pane had also been punctured. We got busy with the duct tape and prayers that the window would hold until we could replace it. At the campsite in Jacksonville, IL, we took the cover off the bikes and noticed how the bike rack and been bent back by the force of the wind to reduce the clearance from the window.
We removed the cover. We made it to Lafayette, IN, without further incident. Lance, the trailer manufacturer is sending a replacement window via UPS overnight shipping. Our friends in Lafayette, a long time neighbor and family friend from Angie’s hometown of Renton, WA, (Ann and her husband, Brian) put us in touch with a local RV repairman who agreed to meet us at their house to replace the window. We also ordered a new bike rack to replace the deformed one. Unfortunately, the new rack won’t arrive until tomorrow, which will cost us one of our three nights we had planned to stay in Nashville, later in the week.
