Bob and I lounged all morning watching the comings and goings of the holiday crowd. What a shock to be here for 10 days basically alone in the center section of the campground. Then all of a sudden a band of gypsies settles in all around us with every gadget and piece of equipment imaginable bursting out of their vehicles and storage units. We have lawn chairs, grills, tables, bicycles, lights, bug zappers, Astro-turf, lanterns, firewood, tarps for firewood, pets, clotheslines, bird feeders, firepots, golf carts, kids, grandparents and fireworks. An entire shantytown has sprung up around us.
We decided to get out of Dodge for a while. We drove to Kalamazoo in heavy traffic on I-94 around 1:00. South on Westnedge we found two large sporting goods stores and went in both of them to check out golf carts. The first place, MC Sports, had three models. Bob measured them in their folded up state but they were all too tall when compressed to fit into the storage compartment he made in the back of The Beast. We have used the same style of pull carts for 15 years so he made the storage space to fit them. In the past few years there has been a total redesign of golf pull carts. It started with the Relax The Back Stores' models that are supposed to be easier on your back. Now Bag Boy, Sun Mountain and others are getting in on the action. But these new models have wheels twice the size of our old ones (the easier to pull, thus less stress on your back.) While I'm all for that, they don't come near fitting in our overhead rack that Bob custom built in the back of the truck. We had a discussion about redesigning the storage compartment but that is no easy task now that we are on the road and all of his tools went in the estate sale. So we decided to forge ahead and keep looking for one that folds up to the size we need. We'll only resort to a redesign if we can't find one.
The next sports shop down the road had four models. Two would fit if we took the big wheels off every time. One had a unique folding mechanism that made it smaller than our current models. It was like Rubik’s Cube to figure it out the first time. But Bob nixed it because one flimsy piece held the weight of the entire cart and bag. He figured it would break after minimal use. So we forged ahead. Across the street we found Big Kmart and thought we'd give it a try. They had one model of gold cart and it was a twin of the model we are currently using. It folds up to the exact size we need. For less than $30.00 it came home with us. After all of this shopping we were famished. At the end of the parking lot we saw Empire Chinese Buffet so we didn't even move the truck. We just walked down there and pigged out on a huge buffet. It was not as good as the one in Lebanon, TN, but that one will be hard to beat. They had great Shrimp Egg Foo Young and a divine hot tea.
We rolled out of there, got a paper on the sidewalk and drove downtown Kalamazoo looking for a bookstore in the downtown mall. The main street in Kalamazoo had been turned into a bricked paved mall that you could walk between the stores. We did a drive-by of the book store but never found a parking place. So we kept going back south out to Portage Road and found a great used bookstore out past Air Zoo Museum. It was one of those small, cramped places with books piled on the floor everywhere. The tall thin studious looking guy at the front desk knew every book he had in the place. We found six books for our reading list. The bank across the road said 65 degrees at 5:00 p.m. That's about 30 degrees cooler than yesterday this time. And the humidity went from 92% down to 30%!
About 5:00 we drove back west on I-94 and saw an awful wreck going eastbound. A travel trailer had been hit and was being towed away. It looked like a garbage truck was involved. Traffic was backed up to Chicago it looked like. We inadvertently got off at the Paw Paw exit instead of the Decatur exit so we took the back roads to 669 and pulled into Leisure Valley just as an old Class A was pulling in coming the other way. This place is really filling up now. We ducked inside and read the paper. How nice to have the windows open and to feel a little chilly!
We watched Cats and Dogs but I never saw one Dachshund; there were lots of Beagles though. It's 10:47 p.m. and 61.7 degrees. Now if no one sets off a firecracker under someone's propane tank we'll all survive the weekend.