Alright, alright, alright! We left Topeka in our shiny new truck and hit the road at actual highway speed, like the whole time. The old truck was not fast. Even though I added an auxiliary transmission cooler in Santa Fe (while SueBee was having her spleen out), the transmission would easily get above boiling on anything other than flat terrain with no headwind, so we limited our speed to 55-60 MPH whenever we had our trailer in tow. With the new truck you can barely tell the trailer is back there. The new truck also has a much larger fuel tank – so we can drive non-stop for hours, as opposed to stopping every 150 miles in the old truck.

We made record time from Topeka, through Des Moines, and stopped overnight in Brooklyn Iowa. We woke up early and drove the last couple hours to Sandwich Illinois, which was our Saturday destination. We made some extra time for our overnight in Chicago to visit with a close friend. I dropped Kristin off at a coffee shop so she and Linda could catch up, and went off to entertain SueBee and myself at the Sandwich County Fairgrounds for a few hours. This wasn’t hard to do, because the fairgrounds just so happened to have a truck and tractor pull that afternoon. So I got to watch these jacked up turbo-diesels haul variable loads until they got stuck in the dirt, and SueBee got to smell all the smells and run through the fields. Despite the event going on, the Fairgrounds RV Park was not very full so there was plenty of space to roam around.

Kristin got really some really tasty African coffee – served in it’s own little pot, and later the three of us met up for deep-dish pizza. Kristin snapped a really cool shot of the moon over our camping spot at the fairgrounds. We woke up early so we could see Linda for another moment before we hit the road, and also because I owed Linda an IT house call to fix her WiFi network so she could have reliable zoom calls in her basement office.

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Hugs and goodbyes and we hit the road again, bound for the Cuyahoga County Fairgrounds near Cleveland. The entire drive there from Chicago basically hugged one body of water or another, and we enjoyed the scenery. At some point we went through Toledo and made an obligatory call to our only friend from there. Less than two hours later we pulled into the fairgrounds and set up camp for the week. We’ve spent a lot of time camping in the boonies, so it was a nice change to have fantastic internet coverage for a second week in a row.

A few friends we talked to during the week asked where we were, and we kept getting the same question: “Why Cleveland?”

We try not to drive more than a thousand miles a week – Wickenburg to Topeka was a little over, and Topeka to Cleveland is a little under. We’re headed up to Maine for a wedding, and Cleveland to Bangor will be just about right. In addition to being the right distance to get us to our next waypoint, Kristin and I regularly make a pilgrimage to Cleveland. I’m a big fan of the great lakes, and we both love the restaurant Cleveland Vegan. Our last run up there was just a quick overnight before Thanksgiving – we arrived in time for dinner, stayed overnight, had breakfast there again, and took home takeaways for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s also a really nice city to hang around in – they have nice neighborhoods and a decent cost of living.

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There was plenty of grass at the fairgrounds for SueBee to run in, and you would have no idea that this pup is a cancer survivor and recently had a major organ and enormous tumor removed. She just gets so excited to run, and we think she missed having so much grass around.

We had a decent week in Cleveland, and Kristin even found some cool bike trails. She’s been putting more and more time into her cycling hobby, and she’s really into it. She’s currently training for a 100-mile ride in Kansas and if you want to read more about that, she’s blogging about it on her new blog over at thecountervortex.com. We made it to the lake once, and Cleveland Vegan twice. We walked the fairgrounds a few times and watch people set up for the upcoming fair. We’re looking forward to our next run out to Cleveland, which I bet will be just in time for Thanksgiving.

Until next time – safe travels.
-Adam