Lake Shelbyville & Casey, IL

We packed up the RV on Tuesday, Sept. 18th to head out and a gentleman came over to chat with Gary about his Andersen hitch and asked if he liked it blah blah. He was to be at the campground for a month visiting his son and family who live minutes away. People always share their stories of where they’re traveling and why they’re in a certain area. 

When we think of Illinois, we think of Chicago. But, there’s a whole rural component to IL. Acre after acre of farmland. Did you ever see the old Alfred Hitchcock movie North by Northwest with Cary Grant? He gets off a bus in the middle of nowhere and there’s nothing but cornfields in all directions. Then the next thing you see is a crop-duster trying to kill him. Like that… minus the crop-duster trying to kill us. We were at a 4-way stop sign with cornfields all around and not another car, truck, or person in sight. A foreign landscape.

We check in at Forrest W. “Bo” Woods Campground in Shelbyville. A lovely Corp of Engineers park on a lake with huge campsites. We pull into our enormous pull thru site, unhitch and Gary starts the leveling process. I ask if he needs any help, he says no. Cool. I’m sitting at the picnic table emailing mom to let her know that we’ve arrived. And, WHAM, a big thud. One of the front leveling jacks gave way and hit the ground. Uh oh. This is the same leveling jack that Gary replaced just a few weeks ago, because it was causing trouble before we left home. So, now we have a little bitty problem. We’re only supposed to be here one night and now we can’t hitch back up because we can’t get the 5th wheel up high enough to get it mounted on the kingpin in the truck since the landing gear is broken. We head up to the office to see if they have a name of an RV Mobile Service. Yes, there’s a local RV mobile guy, who’s really good and really nice and camps here every other weekend but nobody can remember his name. I google based on what town he’s from and find him. Gary calls and Chad shows up in 30 minutes flat on his Harley motorcycle with a small tow behind trailer. He can order beefier, stronger front landing gear than what we have, which of course, comes with a beefier, stronger price. We tell him go ahead. The landing gear that came with the RV is a piece of crap. That’s Gary’s term only he used a different 4-letter word but I’m trying to keep this clean for the (almost) 99-year old mom that will be reading this. The new parts will be in on Friday and he can do the install on Friday or Saturday. Oh-kay. But we can’t stay on this site because someone else is due in for the weekend. How do we get the 5th wheel moved to a different site? He suggested using jacks to raise it up. Gary has jacks with us just not strong enough for this job. We head out that night to Home Depot and ride through a bunch more cornfields to get the appropriate (2) 12 ton jacks that we’ll need to raise this puppy up in the morning.

Chad had said that they have non-reservable sites here so he suggested getting hitched up in the morning and plunking ourselves on one. Even though there’s signs up that clearly tell you not to do that until you’ve checked in, but we’re special. 🙂

Wed., Sept. 19th dawns and we go scout out sites in the non-reservable section to be sure that there is some availability. There is. But, the office doesn’t open until noon. Of course it doesn’t. We head back to our campsite and get the inside packed up, slides pulled in, etc. Ok, nothing left to do now but do the deed and attempt to get this sucker on the truck. Gary sits on the ground with the 12-ton jack next to him and a bunch of cut 2×6 boards at the ready (which he was smart enough to figure out that we’d need). Luckily the landing gear on the other front side was still working. So I pushed the button to raise that landing gear on the functioning side at the same time that he’s raising the jack where the non-functioning landing gear is. It’s a sloooow painstaking process of him using the jack and slowly putting in blocks of wood to raise the 5th wheel up and me pushing the button when he tells me, too. A couple comes over to chat us up. Campers are nothing if not curious or helpful. “Headed home?” the wife says. “Not exactly” I say.  I try and give her the short version of our problem. While Gary interrupts me with “hit the button,” “stop,” “hit the button,” “stop.” Meanwhile she’s telling us how they just arrived here last week from Montana, they had a tire blow out on the drive here, strangers stopped to help them on the side of the road, their headed back home to Nashville shortly, what they had for dinner last night, blah, blah, blah. In time, they wander off. We eventually get the 5th wheel high enough that it can now go on the kingpin in the truck. 

We head over to re-register at the office since by luck it is now exactly noon and we’re legal to occupy one of the non-reservable sites. The office person says go put your rig on a site then come back and register. Off we go to pick one. We already knew what we wanted. It happened to be a back-in site with a water view. This will be our first back-in site on this trip. We totally nailed it!  On fire… put us out!!!  Not sure if we just got lucky, if God took pity on us, or if the two practice sessions at home actually paid off. In any event, we did great. 

Then started the painstaking process of unhitching, which was the reverse of what we had just done an hour ago. Now we’re sitting on blocks waiting to be fixed up on Saturday morning. 

After all that happy hurrah. We didn’t do much the rest of the day but be grateful that we can just chill out and we don’t have to go anywhere. 

Thursday, Sept. 20th 

Our 38th wedding anniversary! We didn’t exactly plan to still be in Shelbyville but that’s ok. We’ve got a nice site with a water view and Gary’s cooking me pancakes for breakfast. Not a bad way to start an anniversary morning. We ran some errands since we weren’t sure when Chad was coming to do the fix (Friday or Saturday) and we needed to be around for that. We discovered Aldi, a discount grocery store chain based out of Germany. You can find milk for 88 cents/gal and potato chips for 69 cents. Not that we need the potato chips. But, oh well. Aldi saves money on staff with charging 25 cents for a shopping cart. When you return the cart, you get your 25 cents back. And, they don’t bag any groceries. The clerk puts all the items back in the cart. Then you head to the front of the store where there’s a shallow table surface running the length of the store and you bag your own groceries. The prices are amazing! Gary cooked steak tips for dinner for our anniversary (not an ALDI item). Temps were in the mid 90’s and humid so no campfire tonight! We watched a movie about Winston Churchill and learned a new phrase. KBO, which means “Keep buggering on.” We think that one will stick for us! Do we know how to have an exciting anniversary or what! 

Friday, Sept. 21st

We woke up to thunderstorms and some morning rain which thankfully wiped out the heat and humidity. We rode our bikes around the campground and marina area and can cover 4 miles just on the interior roads. I did laundry and Gary cleared out the underbay and took out the other front landing gear that’s being replaced in preparation for Chad’s arrival. Chad called and said he’d be over 8AM Saturday morning. Awesome! Then he called back about an hour later when he got home and said there was a glitch and the part hadn’t arrived. Wouldn’t be in until Monday. Ugh. Chad said “if you’re looking for something to do, you guys seem pretty adventurous, you can go check out the town of Casey. They have the biggest rocking chair, knitting needles, wind chimes and all that stuff.” Hmmmm…. think we saw that featured on CBS Sunday Morning. That’ll be cool to see. Me: “What makes you say we’re adventurous?” Chad says “the email you sent me.”  Ooops…. he accidentally got on the blog list when I added his contact info to my address book. Well, that’s a tad embarrassing. 

That night we sat outside since the weather was perfect and enjoyed a nice evening campfire and listened to our new country music playlist, which we put together before this trip. 

Saturday, Sept. 22nd

We headed off to explore the town of Casey (pop. 3,000). We drove over an hour through cornfield after cornfield which we just think is a kick!  We arrived at Casey and sure enough saw the World’s Largest Pitchfork, World’s Largest Golf Tee, World’s Largest Wind Chime, World’s Largest Rocking Chair, World’s Largest Knitting Needles & Crotchet Hook (2 different records mind you), World’s Largest Mailbox, and the World’s Largest Wooden Shoes. Then they have “Big Attractions.” Not necessarily “World’s Largest” but “big.”  Like what you say? So glad you asked…. wooden token, pencil, bird cage, bookworm (which sits in front of the library), and a few others. Really have you lived if you haven’t seen the World’s Largest Rocking Chair, I think not! But how impressive for this tiny town to want to bring in tourism dollars. There are beautiful flower displays all around the downtown, some cute shops and restaurants and some older historic looking buildings in the downtown area. Really, quite impressive! We had a great lunch at a little cafe and because it was the first day of Fall, they had a raffle going and you could win a prize. We won a peanut butter cookie to finish off lunch. Life is good!

On the way back we stopped at the campground office to extend our stay here for a few more days and bumped into the couple we’d met when we were trying to hitch up the 5th wheel. I enjoyed them much more when we weren’t stressed trying to hitch up. They head home to Nashville on Wednesday and were enjoying time with their son and his family. 

We headed back to camp and I went for a walk then we did another evening campfire listening to a 50’s/60’s playlist. A beautiful fall evening. 

Sunday, September 23rd

A beautiful day in the low 70’s. We headed to Lake Shelybville Dam, which we thought would only be a mile or two down the road. 15 or 20 miles later we finally got there. Gorgeous area. The lake is 20 miles long and about a mile wide under normal conditions. It can widen to 1.5 miles and lengthen to 30 miles when it’s controlling a flood. There’s a huge visitor’s center which was closed on a Sunday, hiking paths, and biking paths, a marina, etc. We should have researched it before we left the campground, we could have brought our bikes. But, alas, we didn’t think of that. We wandered around the different areas for a while and then headed back to the campground and rode bikes around there and relaxed for part of the afternoon. And, did another campfire at night until the mosquitoes were feasting on Gary and we called it a night. 

Monday, September 24th

Yay! Chad called this morning and was headed our way with the new jacks/landing gear. Gary and he worked together and got everything installed and tried it out. All functioning well. Chad noticed the 5th wheel wasn’t sitting completely straight when it was hitched up and suggested raising the kingpin a bit to better align the rig. It would tow better and we wouldn’t have to raise the landing gear as high to get it on and off the truck. The boys tackled that and had it fixed in about an hour.  Chad was a sweetheart!  I gave him a hug… and a check 🙂

I rode my bike some in the afternoon. Gary re-organized all the tools, and we got organized to hit the road tomorrow. I was going to post this tonight but Gary wanted me to wait until tomorrow so I didn’t jinx us! Not that we’re superstitious or anything… 

(Since we were able to take off successfully this morning {Tuesday, Sept. 25th} to Tom Sawyer RV Park in West Memphis, AR, it’s now safe for me to post this!)