Back in Shipshewana

Got to Shipshewana, IN late this afternoon.  Big difference from Virginia to here.  While we left Fredericksburg, VA in light rain and arrived here in light rain, the temp here was 46 degrees as we got out of the truck to unhitch.  That's about 20 degrees lower than when we left Fredericksburg.

We're located in the Shipshewana South Campground.  This place has over 100 campsites.  I doubt if there's more than 12 units in the campground this evening.  We've seen it pretty full in the past.  Seems sort of lonely. 

The pictures on today's post are of the Friendship Village Campground in Bedford, PA.  It was another opportunity for Donna to practice with her new camera.  This campground is significantly larger than when we first visited back in 1993 with Doug and Katie in tow.  The number of campsites have doubled since then with a whole new area with pull-thru and back-in, full-hookup sites & 50 amp electrical service.  And more pull-thru sites are being built.  In case you didn't want to use your satellite TV, they have over 70 cable channels - most digital.

Last night's stopover was at Green Acres Lake Resort near Lake Milton, OH.  This park was closed, but they let us in as they had water & electric up and available.  It's an older park, clean and all facilities were working. By appearances, it appears to cater to seasonal (summer) visitors.  It's good for an overnight stop with Good Sam and Passport America discounts.  We hadn't had a campground all to ourselves since we stayed over a Labor Day Monday at Big Meadows in Shenandoah Nat'l Park.  Since there were so many seasonal units stored at Green Acres, it didn't seem empty.

Couple of updates:  First, we're finally in Verizon 4G coverage and strong signal.  MiFi's doing well and supported both the laptop and iPad2.  Maybe the SIM card was the issue.  We'll keep using it and see if it keeps up.  Second is the truck ride.

For those that have followed us since we first started towing with the F450, you're painfully aware of our struggle to improve the ride and the suspension changes we made last year.  It all helped, and it appears we're still making progress.  It's been clear over the last year that what we are feeling is just from the truck and not feedback from the trailer.  Well, we've now started playing with the air pressure in the trailer king pin (5th Airborne unit) just to see if it'd make a difference.  Since leaving Gulf Shores, AL we've lowered the air pressure in steps to see if it would help.  This trip we lowered the psi in the king pin airbag to 75 psi.   Today was probably the best ride we've had on the Ohio Turnpike with the F450.  It's still a bumpy ride (as it's still a bumpy highway), but there's a significant improvement in the ride quality since our first trip out to West Yellowstone and the G&G gathering when we followed Brian and Lee Ann in their motorhome.  We've had a lot of trips along the Ohio Turnpike since 2009 and today's ride was the best so far.

So what's up while we're here?  If all goes well, we'll move over to Lagrange, IN either late Sunday or early Monday morning for trailer service.  Once that's completed, we'll come back to Shipshewana to make plans for moving on to Voyageurs Nat'l Park.  At the moment it appears Donna's located several bike trails in and around Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan.  Looks like a stay at Traverse City is in our future!  Later, David