travel dates: July, 2022
And then we left Ingalls Homestead and headed home! There were still several stops to go, though, because we don’t live anywhere near South Dakota.
Also because Ari had a gig doing research at Iowa State that summer, and we wanted to stop by and visit him. I already told the story behind this picture, but it was a long time ago now, so here it is again:
Ari wasn’t with us on most of the trip this summer, but we were able to stop by Ames, IA, site of his summer research job, to visit him on our way back home. Abe has a license plate game he travels with, where he tries to find a license plate from every state over the course of our summer trip. For quite awhile this past summer, he was stuck with every state except Hawaii, which is a tough one to get for obvious reasons. We had more or less given up on finding it this summer, as we had only less populated midwestern states ahead of us and no more big tourist attractions that would attract a geographically diverse crowd. But then we picked Ari up to take him out to dinner. Within three minutes of getting in the car he said calmly, “oh. There’s Hawaii.” We were certain he was joking. But he wasn’t! He spotted the first Hawaii license plate of the entire summer in his first five minutes with us in Ames, Iowa of all places. It was extremely exciting.
We stayed at Little Wall Lake Park campground while we were visiting Ari, and we can recommend it even though there were terrible storms the night we were there. That wasn’t their fault.
Next up we drove just about 80 miles southeast to Kellogg, Iowa, where we stayed at the Kellogg RV Park, where one can park one’s RV and partake of one of Iowa’s Best Burgers (and get gas!) all at one convenient location!
The purpose of this stop so close to the last one was so that Gus could tour the nearby Grinnell College (which, spoiler alert, he liked and applied to and got into, but is not attending):
We also found a lovely little botanical garden in nearby Newton:
Okay, so Kellogg RV Park is a great little park. Everything’s very nicely kept up, the public areas are great, I really do like having a restaurant on site whether or not I might quibble about the burgers being the best in the state. It’s surrounded by cornfields! There’s whimsical art on the buildings! There are chickens! What’s not to like?!
Well, I’ll tell you: our site. Which I believe was site #2, but which should have been site #don’t-put-an-RV-here-there’s-not-enough-room.
It was a pull-through, but it still took some serious maneuvering to get into it, because this was one side of it:
And this was the other side:
As you can see, we just managed to fit by pulling far enough forward that our slide was past that tree and could just barely clear the sign.
Now this is not an RV Park in the middle of a big city or a block from a beach; it is literally in the middle of cornfields in Iowa.
The reviews for this RV Park are mostly glowing. Because most of the sites are more like this:
I found it annoying not just because our site was so ridiculously tight, but because we paid exactly the same price as the people in the much bigger, nicer sites. It was clear they crammed us in there because they get a lot of motorhomes and 5th wheels and want to save the bigger sites for them since there’s not way they could cram into the site they gave us. But I’m not really interested in being jammed into the cruddiest site in the campground (especially for the same money) because I bought a smaller trailer (it’s not even very small! It’s 32 feet long!) It still gets me a little riled up nearly 2 years later looking at those pictures! So! I still recommend the campground if you request one of the wider sites (looking at the map, sites #24-38 are the widest sites in the open area pictured above). Not all the narrower sites were nearly as bad as ours, of course. I don’t know if they honor such requests or not (we didn’t reserve a specific site), but I personally would not stay there again if they wouldn’t guarantee me one of the nicer sites.
Onward! We went. To Hannibal, MO. Ari and I had been to Hannibal before, but the younger kids and Dave had not, so we decided to make a stop. We stayed at the Mark Twain Cave Campground, though we did not visit the Mark Twain Cave.
We liked this place; it was not at all crowded while we were there, but it’s a big, sprawling campground with nice, big sites.
More whimsical artwork!
AND a winery on site, which Dave and I took advantage of.
We’d originally planned on two nights here, but we opted to leave a day early so we could break up a planned very long drive the next day. So we spent one afternoon/evening checking out all the Mark Twain stuff downtown (and having a surprisingly tough time finding a restaurant. When Ari and I were there a few years ago there was a nice brewery on the river, but it had closed. It looked on this visit like Hannibal tourism has seen better days). Anyway, here are a couple of pictures, but I go into more detail in my other Hannibal post if you’re interested.
And I’m stopping there! We had two more quick overnight stops ahead of us still, but they were not really anything blog-worthy.
So that finally wraps up our 2022 summer trip! A few weeks before we start our 2024 summer trip! Thanks for following along!
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