My motorhome, my family, my adventures, my life.
Copyright 2003-5 Randy Charles Morin
This spring, Brayden has been playing in goal. He's always wanted to play goalie, but there was always an excuse why he couldn't. The pic is at shinny hockey.
In his first year, they didn't have a full-time goalie and were taking turns in net. Before it was Brayden's turn, one of the players decided he would be the full-time goalie. When the full-time goalie didn't show to a game, we were always on vacation.
In his first summer league, Brayden was suppose to be the back-up goalie, but every time the primary goalie didn't show, his parents never gave us advance notice. We had to play sometimes without a goalie.
In Brayden's 2nd year, he was suppose to be the back-up goalie again, but when it was finally his turn to play, the coach changed his mind as Brayden scored four goals in the previous game. He wanted Brayden's scoring and never gave him a chance.
Finally, I decided to enroll Brayden in a league where I could be the coach and simply make him the goalie. That's what we did this spring. He's pretty happy.
One of our favorite places to RV is Frankenmuth, Michigan. For me, it's about the chicken dinners. Awesome! The chicken is good. The fixing are amazing. There's two primary restaurants, although others are also great; Zehnders and Bavarian Inn. We ate at Zehnders on Saturday and Bavarian Inn on Monday. I inevitably gain weight when we go there.
This first pic is Zehnders.
http://www.zehnders.com/new-site/restaurant/index.htm
This second is the Bavarian Inn, directly across the street from Zehnders.
My wife likes the Bronners Christmas Store and the Birch Run Outlets.
While there, it turns out it was the World Expo of Beer on Friday and Saturday. The expo hall was packed with beer lovers.
Last time I went was during Oktoberfest and the hall was not nearly as packed.
I really wish I hadn't previous drank a few beers at Zehnders. They sold an entry 4 onces mug for $5 and each beer for $1.25. I bought 8 beers for $10, but gave my last drink away cause I was bursting.
Last Saturday and Sunday, we stayed at Jellystone Park in Frankenmuth, Michigan. We love staying here, as it's walking distance to downtown Frankenmuth and across the street from the famous Bronners Christmas Store (my wife's favorite store in the entire world). It was pretty cold last weekend, so we really enjoyed the heated indoor swimming pool. The WiFi was a little flacky, but worked enough that I got my online chores done.
For the July long-weekend, we are going to the Coke Zero 400 at Daytona Internation Speedway. We leave June 28th around noon and return July 11th. Preliminary schedule follows.
On Thursday and Friday, we stayed at the Port Huron KOA. This is an awesome campground. We've stayed there several times before. They have a road hockey court and my son and I played with some kids from Windsor, Ontario. We ate at their pizza parlor. My kids placed 2nd in the scavenger hunt. The wife and kids watched 'Finding Nemo' at their free theatre. I hit a few in their batting cages and had a couple beers at the bar across the street. Lot's of stuff to do.
The drive from Indianapolis to Brampton is old hat and boring. We tooked the tunnel from Detroit to Canada and stopped at one my favorite restaurants; Tunnel Bar-B-Q.
There's more speedway pics on the Talk-Sports blog.
We noticed an Olive Garden while trying to find the KOA and after checking in we drove 4 miles to a restaurant district and ate at our favorite restaurant.
We also hoped to have a campfire, as this was our last day of camping on the trip. Unfortunately, rain got in the way.
At 6AM, our propane detector went off. I turned off the propane appliances and tried to determine the problem. When I went outside, I found the problem. The campgrounds propane tank was leaking. You could smell it in the air. I disconnected our propane detector to get it to stop whining and we went back to sleep. Two hours later, the firemen woke us up. They were evacuating our part of the camground. We decided to pack up and leave. We were gone by 9AM.
This is a great camground. We likely hit them on their worst day.
First of all, there is no sign indicating that this is a KOA. There are RVs, RV hookups, a casino, a chappel and a horse racetrack. There's no indication of where to register. After driving in circles trying to figure out what to do, I parked in the casino parking lot, entered the casino and asked the casino reception if this was KOA or where the KOA was located. He confirm that it was a KOA, but they don't have everything working just yet. He said I could park in any empty spot and pay whenever I'm ready. And the great news, it's 18 dollars per night. Wow!
We parked right off the racetrack and watched the last horse race from our camping spot. If you horse racing and RVing, then this is likely your campground.
The casino itself was smokefilled, so I didn't even think about bringing the kids inside. When the race ended, most of the crowd left and the smoke died down enough to be tolerable. We brought the kids in and found a section that was less smokey.
The prices were awesome. A beer for 2 dollars. Meals were 4-5 dollars. The food was great. My wife ordered the chilli dog and she got the largest chilli dog I've ever seen.
We also dropped 1 dollar into a one armed bandit. That was the first and only time we gambled all vacation. And we spent two nights in Vegas.
After dinner, I brought the wife and kids back to the RV for the night. I returned to the casino. It was St Patricks day and I was gonna honor this Patrick guy. I sat at the bar, ordered three more beers and talked with the barfolk.
Late at night, this place turns into a nightclub of sorts with a live band. Lucky me, three young pretty girls sat to my right at the bar. The blonde starts up a conversation and after awhile I realized she was trying to pick me up. Poor girl didn't see the ring. Someone already liked it and put a ring on it. Nevertheless, it was good for the ego.
Overall, this is a great campsite, but it's not KOA quality. If you love horse racing, gambling and drinking, then this might be your paradise. BTW, horse racing season is February to May, so I doubt there are many races outside of those months.
The next day we drove to Terre Haute, Indiana. Better. We saw the Gateway Arch. I wish I could've stopped to see it up close, but the US 40 highway had disappeared into a cloud of construction and I wasn't sure where I could park a 28 foot vehicle downtown St Louis.
The WiFi was great on my Vista laptop, but didn't work at all on my smartphone.
Once you clear the flat desert leaving, the rest of drive in Arizona is beautiful with amazing mountains carved into every turn. New Mexico on the other hand is nice at first, but than it is rather flat and unscenic.
We turned off to the historic Route 66 a couple times for gas and food. The route thru Tucumcari wasn't as nice as advertised. We dined at a Dennys that specializes in bad service. They screwed up four of the five meals and worse, they didn't have beer.
Tomorrow is St Patty's day. Rainbow on an otherwise gloomy evening.
The WiFi by Tengo worked, but not well. It didn't work at all on my smartphone.
We ate at a Ruby Tuesday a mile down the road.
We were traveling East, so take the opposite route if you are headed West. We got off at the first Williams exit onto Historic Route 66 and drove thru Williams. That's 5 miles of classic Route 66 driving that needs to be done by more people. Absolutely cute little town. Everything has a Route 66 sign on it. There was a small Christmas store in town that we skipped, but got good reviews from some of the staff at the Grand Canyon National Park.
Route 66 sort of turns into Route 64 after you leave town and cross the I-40 again. Route 64 goes straight to Grand Canyon Village. The trip is pretty boring, until you get there.
Once there, we parked in the RV parking and took the long bus ride to Mathers point. Although Mathers is great, it's not much better than the other viewpoints and it's busy-busy. We took the bus back to the village, shopped and enjoyed the view from the village, which is nearly as good as Mathers.
Next, we returned to the RV and drove along the southern rim to the East exit. There's a dozen or more places you can stop and enjoy great views. After exiting the park there's still some awesome view all the way to Cameron. Once at Cameron, it's an hour drive to Flagstaff.
It wasn't actually the dam that impressed me, but rather the winding road and landscapes that get you to and from the Colorado river. It appears this might end as they are building a bridge to bypass the dam crossing.
I didn't intend to visit the Hoover Dam on the trip, but when I was reviewing the map, I noticed it happened to be along my chosen route. I love it when I get to experience things just because it's there in the way. It's like watching a Star Wars movie on cable TV. Even if I have the movie on DVD, the spontaneity of TV makes the movie somehow better.
The best part of the strip is the NASCAR store at Sahara. They had a good selection of NASCAR items in the store. There was about a half dozen cars on display. The NASCAR cafÁé was good, except that the upstairs was permanently closed and it looked awesome. They also had a couple high-end NASCAR rides. Sahara also had a roller coaster that seemed to be out of commission.
Saturday we walked along the strip from the Sahara to the Excalibur, visiting each casino, hotel, store and restaurant that looked interesting.
Most of the casinos are just that casinos. Not really much else to do other than gamble. I considered betting 100 on the Penguins winning the Stanley Cup as the odds were good (30-1), but I decided against.
Two casinos had very good themes; New York-New York and Excalibur. They seemed more tuned to someone trying to have fun, rather than simply gambling. We ate dinner at ESPNzone in New York-New York. Great place for the sports enthused.
The best part of the location is that the closest other casino-hotel was the Sahara, which housed the NASCAR Cafe and stores.
The WiFi was NomadISP, which meant it didn't work with my cellphone, but it worked well on a standard XP configuration.
The campground itself was just a paved parking lot with electric, water and sewage hookups.
This time we started at California Adventure with the High School Musical and Aladin shows. Then Soarin, the drawing classes, Turtle-Talk with Crush and shopping. We bought a Mickey candy apple. It was so totally awesome! Dude!
Park hop to Disneyland for one final Fastpass filled evening; Pirates of the Caribean, Splash Mountain, Winnie the Pooh, Indiana Jones (twice), Thunder Mountain, Astro Blaster.
We finally got to see the Disneyland fireworks. It was great. The fireworks went off at about a dozen locations thru the park. Second best I've ever seen, better than Magic Kingdom.
We hit Build-a-Bear in Downtown Disney on the way out and ate at Dennys before a taxi back to the campground.
We spent 4 hours in Hollywood around Highland, checking out the stars, buying souvenirs, eating at Carls Jr and McDonalds.
The three kids were interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel Live and might be on TV that same night (I assume it wasn't). That was the kid's favorite part.