Rollin' on the river

Today is "talk like a pirate day." Arr.

It is fitting, therefore, that there be a boat nearby, which we do not intend to pillage. We are at the Belterra Casino on the Ohio river, near Florence, Indiana (map). We've stayed here before, so I will not rehash the casino details or the history of the riverboat, me hearties, other than to say that there is now non-smoking seating available in the restaurants, and we had a nice, if a tad overpriced, dinner last night at the Aquarium Café.

We had a scenic drive yesterday from Louisville on US-42. We actually tried to leave town on the river road, but it was closed at Harrod's Creek, and we had to detour around on I-71 instead. US-42 follows the Ohio within a mile or two for most of the route, and actually runs right along the river from Carollton to Warsaw. The Markland Dam Bridge brought us here for the night, and we'll head right back across to Kentucky this afternoon, to continue northeast into Ohio. We could actually wend our way along the river here on the Indiana side as well, but we did that route a couple years ago, and US-42 is new ground for us.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to swab the decks and adjust my eye patch. Shiver me timbers.

Photo by Joriel "Joz" Jimenez, used under a Creative Commons license.

Slugger

We are at the Jeffersonville Elks Lodge, in Jeffersonville, Indiana (map), immediately across the Ohio from Louisville, Kentucky.

Yesterday we drove up the Dixie Highway, US-31W, from our digs in Elizabethtown. Almost the entire route is lined with big-box stores, fast food venues, barber shops, and, umm, bookstores and drinking establishments catering to the large military community. That would be Fort Knox, and 31W runs pretty much right through it. In fact, a soldier stationed at the fort was seated at our Teppanyaki table Tuesday night.

31W also runs right past the United States Bullion Depository, an impressive edifice surrounded by guard towers, barbed wire, and signs authorizing the use of deadly force. The place is even more impressive in person than in the photos or films, and I'm pretty sure that 31W comes as close as civilians can get. For me, it was impossible to drive by without thinking of the 1964 James Bond movie "Goldfinger," which featured the Depository prominently.

We had plans last night to dine at the Jefferson Club, on the 29th floor of the PNC Bank Tower in downtown Louisville, overlooking the river. We were briefly led astray by a map error that had us believing a Wal-Mart was within a couple of miles; once we got that cleared up, this lodge, across the river, turned out to be the closest place to stay. Not much further, though, there is also a Wal-Mart and a Bass Pro shop in neighboring Clarksville, and that was our backup plan in case the lodge did not work out for any reason.

This turns out to be a great spot; the lodge is quite active, with some 600 members and its own 18-hole golf course, large swimming pool, and restaurant. They offered us a 15-amp power outlet over by the cart shed, but we opted to be a bit further from the golf traffic on the other side of the lot. It's quiet here, but we are lit up like a stage fixture under Klieglights by an enormous HID floodlamp. From the road, though, we are just a silhouette.

As we rode the scooters into downtown for dinner, we found the revitalized waterfront quite remarkable, and the area just a block or two from the river now sports a modern convention center, performing arts center, and, naturally, the Louisville Slugger baseball venue, a modern ballpark in the currently fashionable retro style. The riverfront itself is mostly given to a vast modern city park, complete with transient docks, playgrounds, bicycle paths, and they are even in the process of converting an old rail bridge across the river into a walking/bike trail. The city does seem overrun, though, by painted fiberglass horses, an homage to nearby Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby.



We were so taken by it all that we decided to stay another night, again riding the scooters into Louisville this evening for a quick tour of the waterfront area, followed by a nice dinner at Vincenzo's Italian Restaurant downtown. That gave me most of the day today here in the parking lot to continue getting moved over to the new computer, a project which I must say I am now thoroughly tired of. I'm on the home stretch, though, and hope to post my report in the next couple of days.

We have no particular plan for where we go from here, or even when we will leave, but I am starting to think about getting the brakes done. They were down to 30% about 10,000 miles ago, and they're squealing now under light application (it clears up under normal stopping pressure). And, of course, we still have a weather eye out.

Photos by dannebrog and Ratzapuss, used under a Creative Commons license.

Settling back in to our normal pace of life

We are at Casino Aztar, on the Ohio River in Evansville, Indiana (map). We had a decent dinner at one of their restaurants and a quiet night here in the parking lot.

When we realized we would barely make it to the Ohio River by the time we needed to stop for the night, Louise started hunting around in our vast library of guides. A roadside billboard reminded us this casino was here, and a quick check of the Casino Camping guide said RV's were welcome to park in the lot. The lot I think they were talking about might have been a block west of here, which is now occupied by a huge billiards hall that is part of the Aztar complex -- we are in the only paved outdoor lot left on the property, and it's incredibly small, as most of the parking is in the 1,600-space garage just south of us. Fortunately, there was an Odyssey-sized gap here when we pulled in, and we grabbed it.

Yesterday was a very short-mileage day on account of laundry, which had piled up while we were on our relief operation. We've been scanning for a convenient laundromat for the last couple days, and yesterday presented the perfect opportunity in the tiny community of Worthington. Worthington is a dying town, but it sports the only coin laundry for dozens of miles in any direction, and on a Sunday afternoon we had no trouble parking Odyssey on the street (map). We even walked to lunch in the little Main Street Cafe nearby, where the folks were friendly and the burgers were excellent. (Pretty much everything else in town, what little there is, was closed -- it being a Sunday and this being rural America.)

Today we will cross the Ohio and make our way through Kentucky.

University Alley

We are in Spencer, Indiana, at what just may be the smallest Wal-Mart in the country (map). There is actually a very nice state park, McCormick's Creek, just a couple miles from here, but (1) it was Saturday night on a nice weekend, so we figured it to be either full or with very limited options for Odyssey, (2) the trees looked to be very low, even out at the entrance station, so we did not want to risk getting stuck, (3) the park was heavily wooded, meaning probably no satellite access, and (4) the weekend rate is over $25, and we didn't need any amenities such as power last night.

This weekend is the annual Owen County Apple Butter Festival here in Spencer, as we discovered on our way into town, so we were a bit nervous that parking may be scarce. Fortunately, the Wal-Mart is far enough away that it is unaffected by the festival. The down side to that is we can't just wander over to check it out.

After we made the decision yesterday to head towards Texas, I plotted a route in our customary way, which is to say mostly avoiding the Interstates. I also wanted to stay out of Illinois for the first leg, and looking at the map revealed a nice "blue highway" due south through Indiana, US-231, roughly midway between US highways 31 and 41. We opted for a relatively short stint on I-65 south out of Merrillville and away from the Chicago megalopolis, turning off onto 231 in Wolcott.

Now, I knew that 231 would run through or past West Lafayette when I looked at the map. However, the thought did not cross my mind that the road might actually run right smack through the middle of Purdue University. We enjoyed driving through the campus, which was very slow because Saturday, of course, is Game Day. Students were everywhere, in many cases apparently accompanied by their families, which was puzzling until a quick check of the football schedule revealed that yesterday's game against Central Michigan was also "Family Day" and "Band Day" (the Boilermakers won, which was probably a good thing for us as we rolled through town). As we passed fraternity row, we noticed RVs parked everywhere, including on frat house lawns. I'm guessing family and/or alums have an RV tailgating tradition at Purdue. Had we been there a bit sooner, we probably could have parked in half a dozen spots on campus and no one would have been the wiser. Not being football fans, though, we settled for being waved at like celebrities by the coeds.

We had hardly gotten over being amused by the whole Purdue experience when we rolled into Greencastle, which I confess I did not realize is the home of DePauw University. Unlike at Purdue, US231 did not wind right through the middle of campus (DePauw is a much smaller school), but we still saw plenty of academic evidence, including more waving coeds.

We always enjoy the blue highways and all they have to offer, but yesterday's drive was especially rewarding with the two establishments of higher learning along the way. Even the road got more interesting in the southern half of the state, with the flatlands yielding to gently rolling hills.

From here we will continue on 231 as it follows the White River into Worthington, then continue on Indiana 67 to Vincennes, where we will pick up US41 south, taking us all the way in to Kentucky.

Without direction

We are at the Wal-Mart in Merrillville, Indiana (map). Interestingly, we are just half a mile from the Olive Garden where we ate dinner on our way to the relief operation two weeks ago (and, no, we did not eat there last night), and, ironically, Merrillville was also the location of a very large Red Cross service delivery site, where we had one technology staffer stationed.

Yesterday we took advantage of the free and squeaky-clean dump station at the Naperville sewage treatment plant, then followed IL-59 south until we hit US30. US30 through this part of the country follows the alignment of the old Lincoln Highway, and we very much enjoy driving these oldest of all roads, in all their quirkiness. 30 took us all the way out of Illinois, by way of Joliet and Chicago Heights. As is often the case in old cities, the Joliet segment twisted and turned through downtown, and took us under a 13'4" underpass where our CB antenna went whomp-whomp-whomp on all the girders.

We'd done a good deal of 30/Lincoln Highway east of Chicago Heights three years ago (just before I started blogging here), and this new-to-us stretch of road west of there was quite interesting, if a bit slow.

We were already in Indiana when we realized we didn't really know where we were going. The issues with the dog have preoccupied our thoughts to the extent that we've been sort of running on autopilot. And the last "autopilot setting" was the notion that we were going to try to perhaps catch the tail end of the Escapade in Goshen, and/or stop by our Red Cross chapter in Elkhart. At some point yesterday afternoon, though, it occurred to us that (1) the Escapade is already over, and (2) our chapter will be closed today and tomorrow, as it's the weekend.

We were on a forlorn stretch of highway when this realization hit, and so we decided to press on ahead to this spot, where we knew there was a friendly Wal-Mart near a pile of restaurants. Last night we availed ourselves of the closest opportunity, a Mexican-themed chain called Don Pablo's, which turned out to be surprisingly good even though we did not note a single latino employee in the whole joint.

We were pretty wiped out when we got positioned here last night, which left it until this morning to figure out where we're going from here. I did call the chapter, on the off chance that they might be open today -- no dice. And, while it looked briefly like we might get deployed to Baton Rouge for the aftermath of Humberto, that turned out to be a non-event. And, at the moment, there's no other tropical weather threatening the US (although Ingrid could re-strengthen and take a turn for the worse in, perhaps, five days' time). We've decided to simply head a bit closer to hurricane territory, which means anyplace from about Houston, along the gulf, across Florida and up the east coast to about Charleston. And, while we have friends or family in many of those locations, we've decided to head towards Houston, because we have a motorcycle there that needs to be dealt with, and that will keep us busy unless and until we get called up again.

In a few minutes we will pack up and begin meandering southward through Indiana.

Labor Day conundrum solved

When last I posted, we were in Kentucky, wondering what we were going to do for the holiday weekend. Not in regards to entertainment, but, rather, where to stay for the duration, given that we are in a heavily populated part of the country, and campgrounds had filled up for the big holiday weekend long in advance.

We decided to press on fairly quickly to some arbitrary point north of the Ohio river, to move into somewhat cooler temperatures in the event we ended up boondocking for the holiday. That would also move us closer to Goshen, where we are contemplating attending the upcoming Escapade.

So Wednesday, after packing up and clearing out of Barren Lake a good bit past 2:00 (checkout there was an incredibly generous 4:30), we headed north along US31E, connecting with the Blue Grass Parkway and then US127 through the state capitol of Frankfort, and pushed all the way to the Markland dam (after a very widgety drive on Kentucky 36, 47, and 184) and into Indiana. We continued east along IN156, past the Belterra casino and on to the town of Rising Sun, where we spent the night in the parking lot at the Grand Victoria Casino (map). We arrived quite late, an hour past sunset (and and hour later than our watches indicated, having crossed from the Central to the Eastern time zone), and rewarded ourselves with a nice dinner in the on-premise steakhouse/Italian restaurant, Wellington's, which was acceptable if a bit overpriced. When we came out of dinner, it was refreshingly cool outside, in stark contrast to the past several days.

We spent yesterday morning researching our Labor Day weekend options. Every Corps of Engineers, national forest, and state park campground in Indiana was sold out, and, disappointingly, all the Elks lodges in the state were, essentially, dry camping. It took a couple of hours, but I eventually found a city park in Fort Wayne, of all places, that was on our planned route, offered camping with electrical hookups, and was strictly first-come, first-served. As of mid-day, when I called, they still had space, and we figured we could squeak in on a Thursday afternoon, and beat the holiday crowd. We had resigned ourselves to spending most of the weekend in a completely full park, but consoled ourselves with the idea that it was still a fairly rustic setting on the St. Joseph river, but within walking distance of several restaurants and a transit system serving downtown Fort Wayne. We decided to get under way pronto, to arrive in the daylight and not miss out on our pick of spaces -- by this time, we had already been back to the Grand Victoria for a delicious buffet breakfast, and to take a cursory look at the now-stationary paddlewheeler that houses the gaming operation itself.

We did not get far. Somewhere around the historic town of Aurora, Indiana, we got a phone call from our Red Cross chapter asking if we were available for deployment. I won't bore you with all the details of what transpired next (suffice it to say that the right hand and left hand are not in direct communication when it comes to Red Cross deployment logistics), but the long and short of it is we started to divert to Rochester, Minnesota, abandoned that diversion in favor of continuing on to Fort Wayne, and then diverted again, this time toward Chicago, Illinois.

This second diversion "stuck", and we continued for the remainder of the day to where we are now, at Red Cross relief headquarters in Montgomery, Illinois (approximate map). We made a brief dinner stop at (where else) Olive Garden south of Gary, Indiana, and arrived here on site around 9:30 last night. The team was still getting the headquarters wired and ready for operation, so I worked through until close to 1am, and Louise pitched in until 11:30 or so.

I confess to being a bit disappointed, after all that research, to have missed the opportunity to stay at what looks to be a lovely spot in Fort Wayne. We'll hold that option in reserve for another time, possibly right after this job is finished. But this did render moot the whole question of where to park for the holiday and how to deal with the crowds. We are well situated in the parking lot here at relief HQ, and we even have a power cord good for about 10 amps, which is plenty in the weather we are having here right now, with temperatures in the 70s to low 80s.

It remains to be seen if we will be done here in time to make the Escapade. But it feels good to be back on the job after nearly a year hiatus.

As Louise mentioned, we will likely not be posting much to the blog while we are deployed here. The days are long and tiring, especially at the beginning of an operation. I will try to update our status, though, as things progress and time is available.

Along the Ohio River

Before I continue with the routine posting of our travels, I want to udate you on the situation with our main web site, OurOdyssey.US, and the provider that hosts it, DirectNIC.com.

It turns out that DirectNIC has been up, for the most part, throughout the disaster. Hosted sites were off-line briefly a couple days ago when the last upstream bandwidth provider finally succumbed to lack of diesel fuel, and all connectivity to DirectNIC was lost. That situation was remedied in short order and our site is back on line. In the course of reading about all this, I have been following the blog of DirectNIC's disaster operations specialist, here: http://mgno.com/

I have to say, it is fascinating reading, and paints, in some respects, a very different picture of things than the mainstream media. Just to be clear: these folks are still in downtown New Orleans, in a skyscraper, keeping a telecommunications facility running. They are running on generator power, and are having to deal with their own provisions and sanitation issues. Thus far, they have been able to get supplies and diesel fuel brought in.

In addition to the blog text, follow some of the links to the thousands of photos taken with both their handheld cameras and the streaming web cam that they have been moving around the building. Also, there are some links to other discussions, including postings from people in contact with survivors who are still awaiting rescue.

As for our own situation, we are parked at the Belterra Casino in Florence, Indiana (map). It is still the holiday weekend and we are still in assault mode. There are perhaps six or seven other rigs with us here in the parking lot.

This casino is somewhat of an oddity. It is a $200+M facility with some 600+ hotel rooms, a conference center, spa, golf course, pool, five restarants, etc. but it is, essentially, in the middle of nowhere. Apparently, it is not generating the revenue the owners had hoped (duh!), unable to compete with less elaborate but more convenient casinos closer to Cincinatti and other cities in the region. From the number of people here on a holiday weekend, I would have to concur with the assessment.

The casino itself is on a riverboat on the Ohio called the Miss Belterra. It is connected to the rest of the complex by a massive gangway that effectively masks the fact that one is boarding a vessel. The boat remains docked at all times now, but there was, apparently, a time when it needed to actually be cruising for gaming to be allowed.

In an interesting side story that does have some bearing on the property's financial troubles, the riverboat was involved in a maritime collision on the Mississippi while it was being delivered from the builders to the property, delaying the opening of the casino portion of the resort by several months. While the pilot of the barge she struck was found to be 90% at fault in the collision, maritime law limits the liability of any vessel to the value of the vessel itself and its cargo. The value of the barge/towboat and its load of concrete was far short of the damages done to the $15M Miss Belterra, and the casino partnership had to eat the difference.

Speaking of eating, we went in to the hotel for dinner, as is our custom when parking for free on their property. Not one single restaurant on the property makes any accommodation for non-smokers. Within two minutes of being seated, we were overwhelmed by the cigarette smoke, and had to leave. We ended up cooking our dinner in the parking lot. At least we tried to be good customers... we will likely send an email to the management explaining why they lost our business, although I don't expect it will make much difference here, just a stone's throw from tobacco-growing country.

We parked in the RV ghetto at Belterra Casino. Other than one coach running its generator all night, it was quiet.