Rathbun Lake, Iowa continued - June 29, 2023

We have camped for 50-plus years but last night we made a rookie mistake.

Even though we were concerned about how we would sleep in the heat, Pam had one of the best nights' sleep yet and missed all the excitement that transpired during the night. Rob, however, was awakened at about 2:30 this morning by something shaking the camper and it was obvious that somebody was crawling over, under, and around our camper. Suddenly there was a big bang and Rob looked out his window to see a raccoon walking by. He yelled at it trying to scare it away but it was undeterred. Hearing much ruckus outside Rob decided he was going to have to confront the intruder.  He crawled out of the camper and shined his light at the picnic table, spotlighting the coon trying to make his way into the drink cooler. Instead of being frightened off, the coon merely gave him a look as if to say, " You got a problem, buddy?". Only after Rob began to approach the coon did it decide to lazily make its way out of the camp. Rob discovered that the crash had been made by the coon trying to carry away the grill that had been sitting on top of the table. So Rob cleaned up the worst of the mess, stored away the gear (as we should have done after dinner), and went back to bed. Pam was still sleeping contentedly.

We ate breakfast and got everything under cover just as it began to rain. We sat in the screen tent for a while, feeling the cool breeze and watching the gentle rain.

Lightening was getting closer so we decided to take the opportunity to go into town in search of WiFi and a place to work on our blog. As we approached town, we began to notice debris on the highway. As we got close to town, we saw huge branches broken off trees and noticed the power was out in most of the town. Glad we didn't have that kind of wind at the campground!

We continued on to Walmart to see if the power was on there and discovered the source of the power outage. Several trees were across the power lines and crews were already at work to correct the situation. When we pulled into the Walmart parking lot, we saw that they were without power as well and had suffered damage to their roof.






By the time we arrived back at the campsite, the rain had pretty well stopped and we enjoyed a relaxing afternoon of planning our next couple of stops and working a little on the blog. So thankful for a full cell signal!


A cardinal decided to visit our campsite. We were so excited because we don't get many colorful birds in Farmington and we never see cardinals. 




After dinner, we packed up as much as we could in order to get an early start tomorrow. A shower before bed made the night tolerable. During the day, we found a few ticks crawling on us but not embedded yet. We completed one final "tick check" before bed. We also put the fans in front of the windows before we went to bed to help cool things off a bit in the camper. This evening was not nearly as hot as last night but is still hotter and more humid than we would like.

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