Saturday, May 27, 2017

Days 238 - 248 - Chicago

It took us all day to get from St. Louis to Chicago.  The traffic for a Thursday was ridiculous!  Once again finding a nearby RV site was literally impossible.  We ended up taking space at one of the few that were open.  We ended up in a very outdated and in some regards, delapidated trailer park.  Lots of single-wides going back 40 to 50 years, lots of cars in various state of repair and condition, etc. Definitely a working class, low income neighborhood. After the initial shock, we moved right in and felt totally comfortable.  For the next ten days we enjoyed clean grounds, a friendly staff, full hookups, and great broadcast TV.  For $20 a night, we couldn't go wrong.  Our now unlimited data plan with Verizon gave us great entertainment options.  The train station to get into the city was a five minute car ride with free all-day parking.

On Friday we drove over to Nettie's house, hooked up with George and a few of our old friends and had a great BBQ dinner.  We stayed the night with Nettie and took her to Mother's Day breakfast the next morning.  George was our next mail drop and we enjoyed all of the packages and mail waiting for us. This part of the planning has worked out well, having pre-defined mailing addresses has helped us to keep up with our lives.  We are now formulating plans for once we are overseas.

We have learned that Verizon has a single line, no phone service for $25 that will keep our number active without making or receiving any calls.  All we have to do is set up the service, forward our current number to our free Google Phone number and from that point on folks can leave us voice message and send texts.  Everything gets transcribed and sent to us in an email.  When we have good Wi-Fi we can make calls to anywhere in the world from a US number.  This has all come to pass since my last period of research and we are ecstatic with the new plan.  This will save us a ton of headaches once we are overseas.

Over the next week we enjoyed a long bike ride in the Indiana dunes, drove to Holland, Michigan for the day, took the train into the city twice to visit a few museums. and drove in twice more to visit old neighborhoods, see friends from long ago, and get a Chicago pizza!

No comments: