road trip day #2

I was up again really, really early, like 4am early :-o
I'm not sure why I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep, maybe just keyed up from all the excitement happening getting ready for this trip or maybe it's the anticipation of the trip itself. Whatever it is, Rudee hopes I get it worked out soon. She is tired of me waking her up so before the sun comes up! :-).
I drank some coffee and surfed the web a little bit. The weatherman on TV was talking about storms in Davenport which was only 40 miles or so North of us. I couldn't see any lightning and hoped they would clear out before we headed that way.
It finally got light enough for me to see outside and, by the looks of the cloud cover, the storm was coming our way. Sure enough about 30 minutes before we were set to leave the rains came.
Luckily the worst of the rain was over pretty quickly and it was only raining lightly when I rolled up the hose and electric cord.
The space we were in was a little tight getting out of. There was a large Class A diesel pusher motor home parked next to us. He had parked so the nose of the motor home was at the absolute end of his site. With the way the sites were angled to the road this caused his very large mirror to be sticking out into the road. I knew I could miss the motor home but that mirror just looked like it wanted to reach and grab any unsuspecting rig that got too close.
With Rudee's standing outside to help watch, "sorry Dear, I know it's raining but you said you don't want to drive the big rig :-)", I slowly moved out of our site and made the turn on the road. I was able to miss the mirror by just a few inches but a miss is a miss and we were on our way.

We drove in light rain for about the first 100 miles before it finally quit and we were able to turn off the windshield wipers.
The traffic was fairly light and we made good time. We took I-80 in Iowa to I-380/US 218 north through Cedar Rapids. We turned back west on US 18 and took it a short way to I-35 which took us North into Minnesota where we jumped on I-90 west.
We made the best of our stops and combined lunch and fuel at a truck stop in Clear Lake Iowa. For you oldies fans, this was where Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Booper had their last concerts. They got on a small plane in very cold, snowy weather and crashed just after taking off killing all aboard.
We did make it to Mitchell South Dakota (around 6:30pm) and are staying at RonDee's Campground ($22/night, Escapeess discount) which is really just the back gravel parking lot for the Days Inn. There do have full hook ups including cable TV and there are a few trees so it's not as bad as you might imagine. We all walked over to a Perkins Restaurant nearby and had dinner since it was getting late and nobody wanted to cook. We had a nice relaxing time. Once we got back to the 5er I was ready for bed. It had been a loooooooong day!

Today we are heading for Custer which is about 350 miles. We should be there sometime this afternoon. I'll keep you posted.