6/8/07 (Friday): Not much to blog about today, and no pictures, but I'll give all my blog addicted buddies a brief blog fix!

Yesterday I took Wiley to the Detroit airport for a visit with his family. It's about a 4-1/2 hour drive, but there's a lot of construction, so we allowed an extra hour. We left here at 6:30 AM and arrived at 11:30 AM for his 1:30 PM flight (that included a couple of stops, including one for an early lunch--probably only 4-1/2 hours actual driving). Wiley arrived safely, a full two hours before I arrived back at the campground! And he arrived during Orlando's rush hour, so the trip from the Orlando airport to the house had to take at least an hour! I had originally hoped to stay overnight at Tom and Kristin's, but it was nice of our bosses to let Wiley have off over a weekend, so I wanted to head back to work a full day Friday through Sunday. So I headed straight back to camp.

I took a slightly different (longer) route home, both for the sake of variety and to allow me to swing by and take a peek at the new campground in Muskegon. The area around Muskegon is nice. It's more developed than this area (which has some advantages, but means it's not as quaint as where we are now). It's also much flatter than this area. But the campground is pretty spectacular! It's heavily wooded, and the lakes are a nice size. I didn't actually go in (didn't want to bother our new bosses), but I drove down the dirt road to the entrance and looked in. It looks very well maintained and all the RV's that I could see looked new and nice. I think we're going to like it!

I was absolutely exhausted when I got back, but there were reports of severe weather on the way, so I had to put away all our chairs, the trash can, and take down the awning. Neither Wiley nor I have ever done this all by ourselves, and when we've done it before it's involved ladders and lots of team work. There was no one around to give me a hand, so I had to re-invent the process. Amazingly enough, we've been making a huge deal over nothing! Wiley will be pleased to learn that if you just release the awning and pull it all the way down, you can reach all the release levers and undo the tie-downs without a ladder! It was a snap!

We had a doozy of a storm overnight, so I was really glad I'd taken the precautions. I was awakened about 1 AM by lightning flashes so bright that it was like a strobe light was flashing visibly through my skylights. There wasn't much rain, but the winds were very high. The whole camper was shaking. I was really tempted to move into the bath house for the rest of the night, but I was so tired that I kept falling back asleep.

This morning I got up early, put some chicken stew in the crock pot, and took a walk (about 2 miles) on the bike path. There's a whole new batch of wildflowers in bloom. It was quite cool (50's) and the fog was rolling in off the lake. It's a great way to start the day, and I hope we'll find a good place to walk at the new campground. We got a couple of bikes from my son, but haven't had a chance to try them out yet. I'm looking forward to getting back into some biking.

When I got back, Wilbur wanted me and Stephanie (the other workamper) to clear up some of the debris from last night's storm. He also trimmed some trees. We loaded the trailer up and pulled it with the golf cart and dumped about 20 loads across the street on some property they own. It was fun working with Stephanie. Then she helped me empty my gray water tanks, which Wiley forgot to do before he left, so I invited her to come eat with me. I made biscuits and brown rice and a pea salad to eat with the chicken stew. Yum!

Tomorrow I'm going to make some banana bread for breakfast. I bought bananas earlier this week and then forgot them. The convection oven we gave each other for Christmas has gotten quite a workout. We like it a lot.

I hope that's enough trivia for all you blog buffs. I'll post some more interesting stuff as soon as we get some free time to do some fun stuff. Have a good week!