We pulled chocks this morning at the Rippling River Resort in Marquette MI at 0921 hrs and headed south towards Milwaukee. Before we bugged out, though, we go through a checklist procedure to make sure nothing gets omitted. There are many moving parts and many things to do, and if you skip any steps bad things can happen. Doreen has her tasks and I have mine. One of my tasks is the floors. We work our way out of the coach and then I dry-Swiffer the floors, followed by a wet-Swiffer. The Swiffers are disposable pads that fit on a flat head attached to a handle. They really work very well. So these pictures are the dry Swiffer and the pile of dirt, sand, rocks and crumbs it compiled:
This is just three days worth, and we do not wear our shoes inside the coach, and we use rugs! We Swiffer upon departure so we are not retracting the slide-outs on top of all this stuff and so that the coach is relatively clean when we arrive at our next destination.
As explained last night, we timed our departure based on estimated travel time and earliest check-in time at our destination. So today we motored south along Lake Michigan and a beautiful but slightly overcast view.
We planned several "comfort" stops along the way and one of them is this lighthouse replica. It is adjacent to a restaurant/bar that was closed the last two times we have been by here and appears to still be closed.
At Marinette we crossed the bridge into Wisconsin and back into Central Daylight Time. YEAH! The transition from Central time to Eastern has been nothing short of a PIA. We live and breathe by our Google Calendar as far as events, especially grandkids events, and we are constantly having to verify whether an event time is Central time or Eastern. So we are thankful to be back in the Central Daylight Time zone and in Wisconsin!
Traffic picked up substantially as we passed through Green Bay and then even more as we entered the Milwaukee area. We kept on pressing south on I-43 to I-41 and then east. At 1513 hrs we rolled into the Cliffside Campground in Racine WI, our home for the next five nights.
Our daughter Michelle and her family live just a bit north of us in Oak Creek, a southern suburb of Milwaukee. Michelle works for a US Navy contractor at the Great Lakes Naval Base where she is the curriculum director for the mathematics department. They are responsible for tutoring math to the recruits that lack sufficient math skills to pass the AFQT test for enlistment. To help solve shortfalls in recruitment, the Navy started accepting what the military calls "Category IV" recruits, or high school diploma-holding applicants who score between the 10th and 30th percentile on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, or AFQT. After 23 years of teaching 8th grade math in a suburb of Milwaukee I believe she finds this new position challenging but very fulfilling. Her students want to be there and they want to succeed. She describes students who come up to her after they pass the test and become US Navy Seaman and they are overwhelmed with gratitude. So awesome! We hope to be able to see where she works while we are here. She is pictured here with her new license plate "Mainiac" since she was born at the former Loring Air Force Base in Limestone Maine.
Michelle's husband, our son-in-law Keith is a commercial airline pilot. He captained corporate jets for many years internationally and recently was hired by American Airlines to fly 737's. In fact he was called to duty this afternoon for a flight from Chicago to Los Angeles, so we will see him tomorrow afternoon when he returns. Keith is an accomplished trap shooter too. They own an Alliance fifth wheel 390MP and love camping at the local campground. They will be joining us Saturday here at Cliffside Campground. Sometimes when Keith and I get together we sample a bourbon or two and I brought some from Traverse City for him to try! We also usually have a project or two to work on and this time I think we are going to tackle an MCD shade repair in their camper!
Grandson Joe graduated high school a couple years ago and is a carpenter in the local area. He works for a company that performs all sorts of residential construction including multi-million dollar remodels. Joe will be showing us a couple of his projects this weekend. In his spare time Joe is an amazing bowler and has three 300-games under his belt and an 800 series. Tonight we watched him bowl in a league and he did awesome, So fun to watch him and his friends having a good time at the bowling alley.
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