Festus, Missouri

We had a wonderful time "back home" in Missouri. Always great to see my family, and my cousin Mike and his wife Julie were just incredible hosts.

It was pretty exciting crossing the Ohio and Mississippi rivers at Cairo, Illinois to get there. Those are a couple of really narrow bridges. Luckily we followed another truck that was as nervous as I was and went really slow. I was very happy to be following.

If you look close you can see how the curb sticks out into the road a bit. It did retract our stairs a little more than usual. Except for losing a bungee chord, no damage done.

Friday we went into St. Louis to get some fresh oysters and shrimp for the open house on Saturday. Mike and Julie took us to the Blues district and we had lunch at Blueberry Hill. Best burgers in the city and a really fun place overall.

Next we stopped at Grants Park to see the Budweiser Clydesdales. 

Before going home we went to the Shaw Botanical Gardens and showed Barbara and Julie where our Grandma's house was before the fire.

That night we had dinner at the Dew Drop Inn. This was just a country bar when we were growing up. It has been transformed into a beautiful restaurant and bar with live music on the weekend.

I didn't realize until later that behind the band you can see the Boston Bruins being knocked out of the Stanley Cup Finals by the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Dew Drop Inn

The next day we had an open house with lots of relatives and friends stopping by. It was a great afternoon. These aren't the best pictures but the memories sure are.

Cousin Mike and Barbara

Katie and Barbara became BFF 

Cousin Debbie

Cousin Kathleen and her husband Rick.

Cousin Patty and her fiance John

Cousin Mike with Aunt Ethel, cousin Donna and Aunt Audrey

A small sample of the ono grinds for the afternoon.

Ed and Dennis stationed near the food.

Sunday, Mike helped us fix a small but important problem on the home. As these things tend to go, a few other things were discovered and it turned into a project with several trips to get parts in town. Mike said our fathers would have enjoyed watching us getting all figured out. I said I think we have become our fathers.

That's not good. A little fusing in our temperature sending unit as a result of a broken dipstick tube (which runs behind the manifold on this engine).

In the process of taking care of that problem we discovered that the brake wasn't fully releasing so a replacement to a break line was in order. There's always that one bolt that won't cooperate.

I'm really thankful to Mike for his help. It would have been really frustrating on my own but we had some fun working on it together.

In the end everything got back together and we were ready to roll. Now it's time to turn north.

We are spending the night at Injun Joe's Campground and plan to see Hannibal in the morning. 

Looks like there is one more issue to deal with before we go much farther, though. 

We need a manual switch for the radiator fan. Should be easy as soon as I figure out where to wire it in.