Our trip out of Branson was much less winding and curvy as the route we went in there. We enjoyed a pretty uneventful drive to a cute little private RV park in St. Joseph, Missouri. We stayed at the AOK RV Park there. Smaller park owned by a family who is originally from Germany but have apparently (according to their info) have traveled all over the US and a few other countries before settling down to buy the park in Missouri. From the map you can see they’ve been making improvements. Nice pull through sites, just off the highway – very easy to access and it was a great overnight stop. We even put our bathing suits on and hit the pool for a bit of floating time to unwind from the day and the heat.
We left early the next morning for North Platte, Nebraska where we had reservations for 2 nights. This ride was rougher – the roads were terrible in spots, Moki was antsy and pacing at times, and my anxiety was no help. I’ve been practicing some breathing and grounding exercises and it’s helping some but I haven’t gotten a handle on it yet. We made it to Nebraska hot, tired and ready for a rest. We unhooked the trailer in case we decided to go out the next day while we were there. Right next to the campground was a cute 50’s style diner car restaurant that we spotted in our way in – we were pretty sure we wanted to go there so it made sense to unhook then.
Penny’s Diner was a cute little place to have lunch. Both of enjoyed a delicious meal of reuben’s and patty melt’s with fries and tots. Apparently it’s a chain of restaurants but it’s not all over like a McDonald’s they do have them in several states though. From there we went to the Fort Cody Trading Post. They had a lot of info on Buffalo Bill Cody and souvenirs and kitschy fun stuff to look at and see.
After our touristy stuff we fueled up the truck to leave the next morning and headed back to the RV to relax and enjoy the evening. We are totally enjoying using our Foodi on travel days for cooking. On Tuesday night we made pressure cooked potatoes and pork chops with a mushroom gravy in less than an hour and with very little work. Wednesday night in Nebraska I made this delicious Chicken Taco Soup that is super easy. It’s essentially putting in the chicken thighs (we prefer them to the breasts), dumping in with the liquid and all black beans, kidney beans, corn, tomato sauce, tomatoes, some taco seasoning and dry ranch seasoning. It pressure cooks in a half hour – after just shredding the chicken in the pot I added some cheese, sour cream and fritos and it is so good. We ended up having the leftovers on Thursday night while we listened to the wonderful rainstorm that came in. After so much dry weather it was amazing to have a bit of a thunderstorm – we love hearing the rain on the roof of our home.
Friday morning we got up and headed for a night in Wyoming. We got to the Douglas, Wyoming KOA around 4:30 and didn’t fit in to our spot. It was the weirdest experience we’ve ever had at a KOA. The office person was very snippy about the fact that when we reserved it we didn’t reference the fact that we didn’t want to unhook. We’ve stayed at 18 KOA campgrounds in the last 2 years – we have a few more booked this trip as well – we’ve NEVER had to indicate that we didn’t want to unhook in our site. We stuck out over the end of the site by about 10 feet. They finally put us in a longer site but not without some frustration and exasperation on both of our parts. I was waiting till we left but they are getting a not so wonderful review shortly about the rudeness of their staff and the fact that their website has nowhere to even put the information that you don’t want to unhook from your vehicle. This place was just trying to cram as many people in as they could. We managed to brush off the experience, plugged the RV in and enjoyed leftovers for dinner for the night. We called it a fairly early night so we could be up early to head to Montana Saturday morning.
GnomadicLife 