Hitchcock (Iowa) Presents….

I am finally on the road, chasing dreams and rainbows….and whatever else comes my way. I didn’t actually hit the road until just before rush hour on Friday afternoon. Which meant getting out of town was something of a nightmare. Traffic was stop-and-go for the first couple of hours, after that it settled down to just-plain-annoying. Then it started to rain.

But all that fun subsided once I neared Columbia, MO. The traffic thinned and the rain let up, which I’m certain made all those people on motorcycles much happier. All those motorcycles….it seems that all roads lead to Sturgis, SD right now. At least 50 to 60% of the traffic going by me was either someone hauling one or more motorcycles or someone on a motorcycle. And I was only half-way across MO!

I drove until about 11:15 PM, wanting to put some distance between St. Louis and me before stopping for the night. I needed to feel that the trip had actually started, not that I was just no longer parked in my driveway. But my vision started to fog and I knew it really was time for me to get off the road, so I took the next off-ramp and pulled into the first parking lot I saw. I powered up one of my GPS units and did a search for the nearest Cracker Barrel restaurant. Their parking lots make great places to spend the night and come with the up-side of knowing you can get a good breakfast in the morning without having to cook.

The closest one was only about 7.6 miles away, which wasn’t bad. I started to pull back onto the road and what do I see directly in front of me? A Wally-world! Wal-Mart isn’t my first choice of overnight accomodations, their parking lots tend to be too well lit to allow really good sleep and they are generally busy and noisy all night long. But beggars can’t be too picky and I was really whipped, so I pulled up next to an RV that had passed me on the highway about half an hour earlier, and shut down.

The evening was very muggy and a little too warm, but I didn’t feel like running my generator all night so that I could have AC, so I opened all the windows and tried to sleep. After awhile a nice little breeze came up and I managed to fall into a light, fitful sleep. Which meant that morning came all too soon and I was still way too tired when it arrived. But I ate some cereal and hit the road again anyway. It’s not like I was going to get any rest where I was.

I moved into “drive” mode, punched my destination into the GPS and started to roll. I somehow made it thru KC and onto 29 north. After a few hours I saw an inviting rest area in IA, about 30 miles across the border from MO. I crawled into back and onto my bed, got an hours sleep and had lunch when I woke up. Even with the nap, I knew I wasn’t going to get very far that day and my best course of action would be to find some quiet little campground and call it quits for the day early.

I had a pile of Escapees magazines sitting on the dinette seat, so I grabbed the top one and looked up their “days end” column. The column lists inexpensive-to-free places where you can spend some time when you’re ready to stop. There was a listing for a small campground in the Hitchcock Nature Center in a small town not too far off the highway that was inexpensive and sounded peaceful. I took a chance that it wouldn’t be full since it was a few miles off the hightway. It was a good call. I was truly blessed that the top magazine on the pile had the perfect place for what I needed most. And it was less that 30 miles from where I was sitting!

For $15 a night I got a flat site with electricity in a campground so quiet it almost felt like I was the only one there. The camp host told me that the place is almost never full and he considers it Iowa’s best-kept secret. The campground is apparently only about 4 years old, so it’s not on everybody’s radar yet. It even has nice clean showers that are included in the price–no quarters needed to keep the hot water coming! That was double-nice as I’m carrying a bunch of stuff that I’m dropping with a friend in a couple of days and that “stuff” is completely filling my shower!

The Hitchcock Nature Center is located in the Loess Hills of IA. Loess is a type of compacted soil that only exists in two places in the US. The other area of loess is along the Natchez Trace, most of which I drove last spring. The hills are not exceptionally high—no one would ever mistake them for mountains, but they are very, very steep. As well as very lovely.

Topper and I wrapped up our afternoon with a nice walk along one of the nature trails. It was/is summer, so I had to comb him for ticks afterward (I found 4, none had had time to attach). Then I took my shower and checked my clothes for ticks (didn’t find any, they liked the dog better) before putting them in the laundry bag.

The evening was perfect, the temperature at night dropped into the mid to low 60’s and I slept like a rock. When morning came I realized that I was just too comfortable in this spot to leave yet, Sturgis could wait. I’m sure one or two days of that insanity will be more than enough! I paid for another night of peace and took the day to rest and recover from the stress and non-stop work of divesting myself of my worldly goods and cleaning out my house before last Friday’s closing. I’m soooooooo glad that’s all behind me now.

I had a restful day and took a nice long afternoon walk with Topper. We found a lovely boardwalk and took a nice stroll down that. On the way back to the campground I saw another side trail that said it was a “moderate” hike and led back to the campground in less than half a mile. Maybe as the crow flies….and “moderate”? Hmmmm, if it were a ski run there were several parts that would have rated a black diamond. We certainly got our exercise, but the wildflowers were really beautiful.

By the time we got back to the RV I was ready for another nap…..after I finally stopped sweating. I think I’m a bit out of shape. I doubt that we walked more than a couple of miles. True, a lot of it was pretty much straight up and down, so maybe that played a small part in my exhaustion.

I know I still have a lot of adjusting to do before I’m truly settled into my new life. Knowing that the life I lived for the past 30 years is now completely gone is still a bit of a shock to the system. It’s not that I have any regrets about the break. I always knew I would leave St. Louis someday. I think it’s just sill a little hard for me to believe that “someday” is finally here.