Wilmington Ohio Thousand Trails Park

We are now in Wilmington Ohio at a Thousand Trails Park located about 25 miles from Carol’s youngest Sister, Pat.  The weather here has been much nicer then Indiana with daytime temperatures in the mid 80’s and night time temperatures around 70.  The main thing is that the humidity has for the most part been comfortable, unlike Indiana. 

The campground here is very nice.  Mostly shaded with two duck ponds.  About three weeks before we got here they had a small tornado come through ripping out several trees.  Luckily only a few RV’s were damaged.

We were able to attend the Columbus LDS Temple and see some of Columbus.  On the way there, we passed a truck accident that had happened hours eariler on the opposite side of the freeway.  Workers were cleaning up the mess and transfering the cargo from the truck into another truck.  I did not think it would be there four hours later but I was wrong.  We came upon a hugh traffic jam because of the truck that lasted about 8 miles.  When we finely worked our way up to where we could see the truck, they were merging two lanes into one.  A few jerks had to pass everyone they could and cut into the one lane at the last minute.  Right as we were vehicle number three they stopped the lane of traffic while they brought a heavy duty wrecker truck up to right the truck off it's side.  By the time this was done and while they turned the truck and trailer around to tow, we lost 45 additional mintues added onto the hour wait made it a hour & 45 minute delay.  OUCH!  Lucky for us we are retired and have learned to slow down and go with the flow!

Ohio still has quite a few covered bridges.  We have a program in our GPS that tracks them so we were able to see some while we were here.  Some are somewhat new, built in the 70’s but most are original built in the 1800’s.  Some are still in operation where we could drive right over them.  Most are preserved with a new bridge along side of the covered one for cars to use.  It was a fun traveling over some of these bridges thinking back that horses, buggies, and old cars used to travel over the same bridge in the day. 

In the past several months, we have dodged torrential Thunder Storms, Tornados, and Massive Storms.  Once in Texas we took cover in a restroom with about 50 other people while three small tornados skirted around our campground, now only to be in the mid west where one of the strongest earth quakes on record hit.   A magnitude of 5.8 earth quake hit in Virginia on August 23, 2011.  Although not a big quake for California Standards, it made big news here.  It was felt and caused some damage from New York to Colorado.  It caused panic in New York because of 911 memories, and it being so close to the anniversary of 911.  At the time of the earthquake, Carol, Rocky and I were hiking to a waterfall about 20 miles from where we are camped.  Because the terrain was so rough, we did not even feel it.  We got a text from Carol’s sister that said “did you feel the earthquake?”  or we would not have even known about it.  Later that day we got a call from our Daughter Danielle in San Diego asking if we were OK.  It had made the news there and showed some of the damage to some of the buildings in our area.  It just seems like you can’t get away from earthquakes no matter where you go!

We spent good quality time with Pat, Carol's Sister and her Animals.

Here are some pictures of her cat, Carlie, her yellow lab, Nash, and Jackson, her chocolate Lab.

We have been very busy here in Ohio.  Carol has been obsessed with genealogy since Wisconsin.  We got a lot of information on my side of the family there.  In Indiana Carol got a ton of information on her side.  Between both families now, we have over 3,000 names in our family tree. 

We will be leaving Ohio on Monday, August 29^th and heading to Kentucky.  From there we will make our way into Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and eventually into Florida for the winter.  We are looking forward to the Fall Colors on the East Coast.