Wayne Fitzgerrell State Park, Illinois

17 August 2013

We’re off on another grand excursion, having left Omaha on August 17 with a planned return on September 11. We’ll be going to Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina; Asheville, NC; Williamsburg, VA; Washington DC; Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania; and whatever else strikes our fancy. For part of the trip we’ll be joined by Tall Son and Whistling Son, which means we’ll have four adults sleeping in the 19. It will be cozy.

One of the wonderful benefits of these extended trips is that beforehand we accomplish a lot of tasks at home that would otherwise be easy to procrastinate about. This time some items got piled onto our list that we didn’t anticipate. A contractor, installing new sliding glass doors at our house, accidentally kicked over a can of dark brown paint onto our white carpet in the living room. We didn’t have time to replace the carpeting in the two remaining days at home, but lots of other good stuff got done.

We always meet some true characters on our travels. On our first day on the road we were stopped at a rest stop when an Airstream pulled in next to us. The owner struck up a conversation with us while chomping on a big roast beef sandwich and spitting bits of it at us as he talked. He was one of those people who is only interested in the talking side of a conversation and not at all in the listening side. He was trying to sell us on the delights of group RV tours, which he and his wife have taken frequently. The company he likes is called Fantasy RV Tours, and we’ll look at their website when there is time, although we are too independent to ever consider going with a tour group that way. As the man yakked, we could catch little glimpses inside his Airstream, which was a total pit! His wife did not emerge, but we could see her eating a sandwich of her own in the depths of the Airstream. We decided that this was probably her big chance to be free of her husband’s endless chatter. I got into the Flex and turned on the engine to give the man a big hint that we wanted to leave, but he still kept jawing at Great Husband. Finally we escaped with the man still in mid-sentence, and had a good laugh about the whole episode.

Our site at Wayne Fitzgerrell State Park

A mother deer and two spotted fawns were wandering the campground,
but I was too slow at grabbing the camera.

 

We spent the night at Wayne Fitzgerrell State Park, a little bit south of Mount Vernon, Illinois. We had stayed a couple of times before at a commercial campground in Mount Vernon, but this state park was far nicer, not far from the interstate, and we recommend it. Reservations were not available but we didn’t have any trouble finding a site. If you arrive before 8:00 p.m. there will be a camp host ready to sign you in. The camp host we met was very personable and enthusiastic. With her high-pitched, sing-song manner of speaking. I suspect she was a retired kindergarten or first grade teacher. FYI, sites have electricity, but not water.

Wayne Fitzgerell has an enormous lake and the campground is laid out in fingers of land that edge the lake. We enjoyed the beautiful scene at sunset and then the frogs sang us to sleep.