On the Road 8 x 30; 24 x 7

07-04-2005 Dyckman's on the 4th of July

Monday, July 4th, Happy Holiday! We both woke up kind of stiff from our late evening golf. We lingered over yesterday's unfinished crossword puzzle and watched the Wahooers outside. Most of the crowd is still here. Bob disassembled and robbed the parts from his old golf cart. Then he drilled out the shafts on the wheels so they would fit mine when I 'blow' a tire. We got cleaned up and drove to The Bistro in Paw Paw but they were closed for the holiday. We walked around the front and crossed Red Arrow Highway where we saw the OPEN neon sign for Dyckman's Saloon. We were pleasantly surprised by the upscale decor in spite of the 'saloon' in their title and the historic nature of their old brick building. There were some great old framed blow-ups of turn-of-the-century postcards lining the walls.

Bob had a mile-high chef salad with Blue Cheese dressing. I had a Tomato Basil Vinaigrette salad. We both sampled the Smoked Chicken Chowder. Everything was very fresh and quite well presented. On the way back home we stopped at That Coffee Place to use the wi-fi one last time. My heart sank when there were no cars in the lot. We peered through the windows and the chairs were all upside down on the tables. Closed for the holiday! We decided to fire up the laptop on the off chance that they left their wi-fi up. Lo and behold! We are connected. Patti was on the chat room and it was nice to visit for a while. I had a sad moment when I realized we were with them last year for the 4th and went to the huge fireworks display in Jeff City for the Lewis & Clark anniversary. The car was an oven in the treeless parking lot so I quickly did my mail and journal and signed off. Bob got a paper on the sidewalk and we stopped for gas in Decatur.

We read the paper after turning on the A/C. It is just too muggy. Later we went out and aired up the tires and put the big mirrors on the truck in preparation for blasting out of here tomorrow. I worked on my journal for a while, fixing some pages Patti sent me an email about that were not working correctly. Plus I had to revamp some of my photos. My new Irfanview editing software needed to be tweaked to make the images a more manageable size. I filled up my web page while at the coffee shop. So now I have to reload a bunch of photos. I spent most of the rest of the day working on that. Bob and I took a walk around nine o'clock. There are still quite a few people here and they all seem to be down on our end of the campground. Around ten o'clock we heard big booms and went outside to see if we could see the local fireworks display. But it's cloudy and we sit low here under huge trees so we couldn't see a thing.

I can't believe we're leaving tomorrow. We've been here 15 days but it seems like we just got here. Time gets faster every day in this new life of ours. Bob found fireworks on TV so I guess we'll have to settle for that this year.

It's 10:16 p.m. and 70.0 degrees.