Alaska 2014. Week 1

We left home May 27, 2014 and headed for Clarksburg, WVa.  We spent the night at the Clarksburg Walmart and visited Jim's sister, Sandra and her husband, Ronnie.  Of course we had to stop and get some WVa TLC hotdogs and some pepperoni rolls.  So needless to say, we had hotdogs and pepperoni rolls for lunch and dinner for a few days while on the road.

From Clarksburg we continued on to Indianapolis, Indiana to meet up with Mem and Larry Halstead who are going to Alaska with us.  They were visiting their daughter and her family before they left on
their big trip.  Their daughter invited Jim and I over for dinner and we had a nice evening visiting with their family.  We were all camped at the Indianapolis Fairgrounds which was very convenient to their daughter's house.

The next day we headed out to Elkheart, Indiana to visit the RV/Motorhome Hall of Fame Museum.  It was very interesting to see how the motor homes evolved over the years.  It also made me appreciate the Motorhome I have now versus having gone in 1816 haha!  We camped in the parking lot at the museum.

From Elkhart we went to Amana, Iowa.  This is a quaint German community and we stayed at the Amana RV Campground and went to the Amana village and had a delicious German dinner.  Jim surprised me and even he ate German food.

The next stop was Mitchel, SD.  There we visited the famous Corn Palace.  The Corn Palace gets a new design every year designed entirely of corn cobbs.  Unfortunately for Mem and Larry they were in the process of scraping all the corn off the building and getting the building reading for the new design.   We went inside and watched the movie to learn the story of how and why the Corn Palace was built.

We left Mitchel and were riding along when Larry calls Jim on the CB to tell us we lost the canoe we were carrying.  Jim looks in the RV camera and sure enough there was no canoe on the top of our truck.  We pull off the highway and here comes Mem and Larry dragging the canoe along the shoulder of the road.  The rack we were carrying it on was broke all to hell from the high winds.  We were thankful it did not hit the Halstead's RV or anyone else for that matter.  With the rack being broken we had no way of taking the canoe with us so Jim and Larry carried down the embankment and left it there.  It was dented up in the back and Larry saw a place on the front that could possibly be a small leake but it still would be a could canoe for someone going by with a pickup.  We continued on to a campground in a little town of Presho, SD.  Jim and Larry took our truck to get our tail lights welded that broke when the canoe rack broke and other than that we had a nice evening