Safari RV Park

 

Chanute, Kansas (pop. 8722)

Odd that my camping apps show this as Safari Park but I now notice the sign shows Santa Fe Park.

This is a quiet place even if at a traffic intersection.  But it is at the edge of town so not too busy.  

Across the road is a Ford dealership.   “Ron Bower, line two please.  Ron Bower, line two.  Parts, line one please.  Parts, line one.”

Yes, I hear the announcement of every call coming in.  Not too many though.  New cars aren’t selling.

No sooner than did we park Dad, I want out!

I just told everyone you are now an indoor cat and now you want out all the time in a busy city?

What gives?

Oh, there is a storm drain.  I see now.

Birdwatching.

They have showers but they looked kind of nasty.  No bench or hooks to hang clothing on.

I’ll pass.  Still this was a good place to stay for the Memorial Day holiday weekend.

There are seven baseball fields here, with four of them fake.  I never seen fake grass fields before.  The outfields are real grass though.  This one is still in the building stages with dirt piled up in left field.

Interesting that none of the four fake fields show on Google maps.  All of this is brand new.

These seats were comfortable.

I never seen a ban on sunflower seeds before.  I guess chew tobacco is still okay.

Problems!

 Moline, Kansas (pop. 345)

Moline had three possible places to stay at, two were out in the country, small reservoirs with a dirt road leading into them.  We drove two miles on a narrow track towards the first camp place arriving at a point we had to go down a steep incline. There I stopped the foolishness and backed up a couple hundred yards where we could get turned around, just barely, and exit going forward.  None of the area around Moline had a good cell signal so we didn’t even try for reservoir number two.  In town their small city park had a four-spot camp area.  One other was there and again looked they had been so for a long time.  It had been over an hour’s drive to Moline and now was nearing lunch time.

I fixed lunch and thought about this.

They had everything locked up (the water faucet is too but I cut that off taking the photo).  I had no intention to use the electricity or water.  I just wanted park there.  I almost did the unthinkable for me, go into town and find 101 N. Main St. to get this “permit” just to park.  The cell signal was only one bar.  

That didn’t set well with me plus all these locks.  Where is their sense of trust?

It was quiet but I just didn’t feel like being there.

We wound up leaving, enjoying another half hour of beautiful Kansas country and farmland heading for the city of Independence.

The Problem.

While in Independence I began setting up this post.  I take pictures with my phone and upload those pictures onto the Blogger page.  Then I switch to my iPad to compose and schedule the blogpost.  When I went to put the pictures onto the post page a window popped up about something to do with enabling cookies.  It said my settings were blocking cookies.  I never had seen this before.  When I clicked the ‘accept’ button on the pop-up I’d get a  “something went wrong with the server, try again later” message.  Add to this was that the same thing happened when trying to upload a photo from the iPad.  So I researched this, followed directions for a number of different applications and nothing changed.  This was frustrating.  Frustration is my weakness, my Achilles heal.  I finally came up with a convoluted work-around so I could at least continue blogging but I was just sick at my stomach about it all.  

Server?  Maybe when we get to the next town it will be okay?  

Nope.

Next day, the next town, still the same thing was going on.  At least I am not tired from having driven 103 miles and doing silly stupid stuff on narrow Kansas dirt roads.  This time I didn’t have to invest the same amount of time but finally I got it to work.  I could upload photos without any cookie message.  I could once again upload pictures from both the phone and iPad.  I cannot express how relieved I was that everything thing was back to normal.  The sad part is, like most every other time I have an issue with phone, iPad, laptop, I have no idea what I did to fix it, not to mention what started it all in the first place.

Napawalla Park

 

Oxford, Kansas (pop. 1048)

Napawalla Park was our destination when we got sidetracked staying at Walmart in Wellington.

It was only twelve miles to Oxford.

This was a nice park in that we could park most anywhere in it on the grass.  Numerous power poles were situated around the park to plug into for $15 a night.  Of course we went to the cheap district off to the end  of the park for $3.50.

Nice pay station with envelopes.  No going to City Hall.

No showers and again very weak cell service, no fault of the park.

The park had a disc golf course, not unusual for these city parks but offering a free disc to try your hand at the sport was unusual.  I don’t think that will catch on as the discs were not returned.

Nothing fancy with the play area but they did have a nausea-inducing spinner-go-round that was made out of wood instead of metal.  You were given the chance of getting splinters in your butt when slung off from the wheel-of-death at high speed.

  

We were down at the far reaches of the park well away from about four or five campers congregated together which appeared to be for some time judging by the grass growth around and under their rigs.

I wondered what they paid for a long-term stay.

I wouldn’t want to stay for a long time.  I ran out of things to repair.  So we will move on in the morning.

I think Beans has converted herself to be an Indoor Cat.  The last several places she will go outside soon after we arrive and then want back in.  This place with no one around I still had to kind of drag her along.  Then I picked her up and carried her.  No interest.  I want to go home!

I think she would be different if we were in the desert having lizards for her to chase. 

 Otherwise she seems content to stay inside all the time. 

Maybe we will go back to the desert next winter.  I miss the desert too.

There is No Rush.

 

Wellington, Kansas (pop. 7715)

Known for “…hot, humid summers” and a F4 tornado that destroyed 130 homes and businesses, killing ten people on May 27, 1892.  It is May 25.  We better get a move on.

Wellington was twenty-some miles east from Argonia.  The plan was to stop and pick up a few items at Walmart then move on further east to another city park.

Walmart had been banished to the countryside outside of the city.  

As such, we found it nearly as peaceful and quiet as Argonia’s River Park.

Nothing across the highway.  Why go on to the next town city park not knowing what it may be like?

So after shopping, fixing lunch, we decided to stay for the night and enjoy the good cell service and wifi.

Scenic too with a small creek off to the side.

So what do I do when sitting in a Walmart parking lot all day?  I break things then repair them.

This is a dish I have used for feeding all the cats I have had for the past fifty years.  That’s right, 50.  It has taken a beating ever since it joined me for life on the road.  Some of these breaks are from my stepping on it but most are from something falling out of the refrigerator.  That is what happened this time.  I open the freezer, frozen items fell out and I didn’t catch them all.  It broke clean in half again.  This time I did a proper repair scraping away all the Goop I had used before and put the two halves together with Super Glue.  The other breaks at the top are still holding but they are next for the Super Glue fix. 

Use the Womens

 

Argonia, Kansas (pop.456)

Claim to fame:  Susanna M. Salter became the first woman to hold a political office in the U.S. when she was elected mayor of Argonia in 1887.

This town is fifty miles east of Medicine Lodge kind of out in nowhere.

For a small town River Park had a lot of spaces with hookups in this park, only three campers were here.

There was a rodeo arena close by so that may be why so many spaces to camp at.

We went to the low-rent district, the tent area, no hookups, for $5 a night.

Off to the side flows the Chikaskia River.

Nice that they have the pay drop with envelopes at the lone restroom.

None of this going to city hall to pay.

You can see how much money we are saving.

They even had showers.  The camp host said the mens is turned off because it leaks.

“Use the womens.”

Yeah, I can do that.

Hot water too!

Some of the local residents.

A small creek that flowed into the river…

…seen from the nature trail.

This park was very quiet and peaceful,

but the cell signal was very weak,

and we were disturbed by nine stowaways that evening…moths we brought with us.

By 10:30 p.m. Mothchaser and I got last one.

Whew!  Chasing moths is hard work.

- comment reply -

Check comments on previous post for Damselfly had two links about the moth infestation we experienced.  

Perfect timing on our part to be part of a once in a ten to fifteen year event.

Thank you Damselfly.

Two Mysteries Solved

 

Barber County Lake, Medicine Lodge, Kansas

While relaxing trying to read I kept hearing an annoying sound above the refrigerator.  I took it for a bird on the roof messing around.  But it kept going on and off for a long time.  Too long for a bird for he would have lost interest and flew off by now.  Maybe it is behind the refrigerator?  Oh great, I bet it is mouse trapped in there somehow.  It was just dusk and I knew this would bother me wondering about it so I got up and went outside with a flashlight.  I removed the access panel.

When I did a swarm of moths flew out in the dozens.  

They had been banging around against the sheetmetal and the plastic panel.

Here are some that take shelter in the folds of the bike cover each night.

So this explained how each night I would have to get up and get that one moth that came in somehow and Beans would be chasing it around creating havoc when I would be trying to go to sleep.  How am I getting a moth in here each night when I am real careful when opening the door every time? 

Now I knew; one moth would find his way inside from behind the refrigerator each evening.

 

They also congregate in the hundreds behind these plastic signs next to us. 

When we left in the morning I noticed moth poop on the windows and the front hood of the RV.  There were these dark brown drops running down everywhere.  We went back to the No-Hot-Water Shower park to drop off trash and clean off all the moth poop.  Also, that night before we had five infiltrators.  This pretty much made up my mind to leave even though the rain didn’t happen.

Dreaming of moths.

Yeah, that is her tongue.  Guess she wasn’t sleeping after all. 

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Thank you happyone for the compliments about the blog.

  I also try to keep the posts short, simple and not too wordy,  

but cannot help it with all the Beans photos.  Just the way it is.

More Turtles

 

Barber County Lake, Medicine Lodge, Kansas

After a day’s worth of rain the road out looked like this.  

Come Monday it is suppose to rain for three days.

I don’t want to deal with this when leaving.

We can go out the way we came in as that part of the road held up well.  The road is just a short loop around.  I’ll see how much the rain is Monday and if it is a lot I guess we will leave sooner than I really wanted to for we really have some nice solitude here.

A nice day for a walk at least.  

Looks like this is supposed to be over water but the water level in the lake must be down.

Part way across an earthen dam that divides the lake I found someone in a difficult spot.

Here little guy, let me help you out.

I helped two others while at it.

They were not as calm about being picked up as were the Box Turtles back at Black Kettle.

These guys had all four legs out “swimming” through the air.

The big guy popped his head out and I could see he was a Red-eared Slider, the most common turtle there is, the type you would get at a pet store as a baby and keep in an aquarium.  They are labeled as an invasive species that threaten the habit of native species.  

On the other side of the walkway dam I found a nice wide, thus tick-free, path to walk along.

There wasn’t much to see so I made my way over to the roadway that took me by the lake’s edge.

Here I could see dozens and dozens of those turtles floating about in the lake water.  They truly have invaded this lake.  If I saw that many from this one point, there must be hundreds and hundreds of       Red-eared Turtles in these waters.  It most likely began long long ago when someone released their pet turtles in the lake because they got too big or simply lost interest in caring for them. 

 

I made my way back over the earthen dam feeling bad for Beans.  I let her out and we stuck to the muddy road near camp, away from any vegetation and she was happy with that.

Just another picture of cuteness sleeping while I was away.