Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Shady Lakes RV Park, New Windsor, IL - June 5-10
We continued across IL to the Western side to camp near Mike & Kim. This very nice Passport America park is located about 25 miles south of Rock Island, where they live. We visited them several times at their lovely new (to them) home. We were able to celebrate Mike's birthday together at a delicious cook-your-own steak & seafood place, followed by a round of mini-golf. Doug had the nerve to beat his nephew! On Saturday they came down to visit at the RV (limited time inside due to Mike's serious allergies to cats). Then we all went over to the Rhubarb Festival in the nearby town of Aledo. There were many interesting crafts to see as well as a delicious fish fry with rhubarb dessert. An interesting aside about the town name -- they were unable to agree upon a name for their town, so they decided to draw letters from a hat until they formed something pronounceable. This resulted in the name Aledo. And speaking of pronounceable, Illinois has its own unique way of pronouncing its city names, such as Cairo (KAY-row), Marseilles (Mar-SALES), San Jose (San Joes), and Milan (MY-lan), just to name a few.We liked it here at the park so well that we extended our stay several days after the time we could spend with Mike & Kim. We were able to take a nice drive beside the MS River going on the Great River Road, both on the IL side and the IA side. We found many interesting state parks and campgrounds along the way and think the Great River Road would be an interesting "project" for future travels.
We will either leave tomorrow or Weds (depending on the weather) and head to IA for a brief stop before heading for WI on Sunday.
Just as we finished up this edition of our "tripnews" and were finalizing it to send, some unfortunate (and unknown) set of circumstances caused the computer to gobble it up, leaving us with nothing but a blank email. After several hours of re-creating, we have come up with something close to the original. Hope it doesn't seem too "stale".
# posted by Doug and Willie @ 5:18 PM 
