Long Drive Day

(Stacey writing.) After our late night last night, we again slept in late. Nice way to start a Father's Day and our 23rd Anniversary too! That's right, 23 years ago we said, "I do." The time has flown by and we've been on many adventures together. I think we make a pretty great team and bring out the best in each other and I look forward to many more happy years together.

We got slowly up and and around and Brock started on his checklist. He really wanted to get the hubs greased on the trailer today before our drive. This is the second time that he has done it on this trip and I'm not sure there will be a third. It doesn't seem to go as smoothly as we'd like, but in the end it got done, though Brock was covered with blue grease when it was all over. ;O) Maybe by the time we need to do it again we will not remember how messy and frustrating it was?

I know this is a very silly thing to be excited about but after all our backflushing today, we were able to get our holding tank monitors to read E for empty. Both gray and black tanks! That hasn't happened for several months and it is scary how happy it made me.

We managed to get out of the campground around 1 pm and set out on our five plus hour drive. It took pretty close to an hour to just get out of the Pigeon Forge area and get to the interstate highway. A couple of hours down the road, we decided to stop at Olive Garden for soup, salad and breadsticks for lunch/dinner as a celebratory lunch. It was yummy. The restaurant shares a parking lot with Walmart so we were able to load up on groceries on the same stop, but by the time we got back on the highway, we realized that we won't arrive at our campground tonight until after 9 pm. That's a bummer.

We're going to be staying at a KOA in Natural Bridge, Virginia for the next three nights. We usually try to avoid KOA's since their nightly rates are pretty high already and then they have a per head charge for each kid on top of it and they're usually pretty tight for space, but there wasn't really any other options in the Natural Bridge area and we wanted to see the bridge and caverns that Brock got to see when he and his friend, Joey, made a cross country trek back in 1990 to deliver a big mobile lab trailer. He has fond memories of the spot and we're looking forward to sharing it with him.