Home Again

Since we had put in a long day yesterday, today would be quite a bit shorter.  We planned it this way so we could pick up some things in Shipshewana, Indiana, which we always seem to do when coming home from a trip.  Works out well as the fridge and freezer are usually almost empty so we stuff them with all the meats and frozen stuff we pick up in Shipsee

Cold night last night.  41 degrees when I got up this morning.  The furnace warmed things up inside.  Took a while, but it eventually got comfortable.  I checked the amount of propane left.  The gauge read zero.  I guess we figured this about right.  Run out of propane on the day we come home.  One tank lasted six weeks.  Not bad.

This rest area was bigger than I expected.  I launched the drone to see just how big.  That’s us in the lower center.  Many of the truckers had left by this time, but there was still quite a bit of space left last night.  And we were sort-of off by ourselves, so it was a quiet night.

It was about an hour to Shipshewana.  We took some back roads just to get off the Interstate for a while.  In Shipshewana we visited the usual: E&S Sales for discount groceries, Yoder’s Meats for some of the best brats around, and Forks County Line for more groceries and another big hunk of mystery meat that we just finished from the last time we were here.  We’ve sliced this stuff thin and used it in fajitas and in other dishes.  Worked well and was cheap.  Looks like we’re doing it again.

We got home at about 2pm to a cold house.  I turned on the heat remotely a couple hours ago but the temperature didn’t budge so I was afraid we were going to need repairs.  When I went down to check it out I found out I had forgotten to turn the gas valve back on after I fixed the furnace a couple months ago.  Turned the gas on and it fired right up.

It took us a couple hours to unload six weeks of living from the RV and put it all away.  Deb started a load of laundry, I unloaded the bikes and kayaks and put them away.  We ordered a pizza for dinner because neither one of us felt like making anything.

After dinner Deb went to put the pillows back in the bedroom and came back shuddering and making unintelligible noises.  She told me I needed to deal with a chipmunk that died on the bed.  So I went out there and, sure enough, a dead chipmunk on the bed.  From the bad smell and the large stain on the bed, it had been there for a couple weeks.

I got rid of the chipmunk and all the nasty creepy crawlies that accompanied it, and took the comforter off the bed.  The stain was limited to the top layer, but the smell permeated all the bedding, including the bare mattress.  The comforter will go in the trash, it will probably take a few days to run all the remaining bedding through the wash, and we hope we can get the smell out of the mattress.

Meanwhile, we were looking forward to sleeping in something larger than our small RV bed, but it looks like it’s the spare bedroom for us for the next few days at least.

Welcome home. 🙄

So, looking at some trip statistics, here is a map off all the movements for the last six weeks.  I had a tracker going on my phone the entire time, so it recorded everything, including walks and bike rides.  It seems we put on nearly 400 miles walking and biking, in addition to the miles we drove.

Miles Driven: 3687

Total miles moved: 4038 (includes walking and biking)