6 Feb 2019 - Itinerary Adjustment, Action in the Campground, Baseball Tickets in St Louis

6 Feb 2019
Nothing huge today but lots of little accomplishments.  We had some excitement in the campground this morning.  One of our neighbors was visited by several of the Navy Security Forces finest, and before long the guy, his pickup with trailer full of 4-wheelers and his big motorhome were all escorted off base!  Not sure what he did....

I had been having some issues with our WiFi Ranger mobile router system rebooting repeatedly.  I called tech support and worked with them on a solution.  They wanted to upload and install a new firmware release, so they initiated that remotely and said to give it 30 minutes or so.  Bottom line is it died in the middle of the firmware upgrade and "bricked" the router (rendered inoperative).  So they are sending me a new one and it will be waiting for us when we get to my sisters next week.

We drove to the Security Forces office to confirm the process of out-checking my weapon upon base departure.  Pretty simple process.  From there we went to the RV Park office to check in and see if anything had changed about us being able to extend a few more days.  We are supposed to be leaving Saturday and traveling about an hour to Kingsville Naval Air Station, camping there 9-13 Feb and then heading to my sister's.  In a perfect world we would like to just stay here 9-13 Feb and not go to Kingsville at all.  It does not appear there is much to do there.  So we talked with the staff and contrary to what we had been told, we were NOT on a waiting list.  So they added us to the list and I made sure they knew how much we appreciated their assistance with this.  We left there with little hope, but gave it our best shot.

Back at the RV I continued to work our trip planning, cooked up some sausages on the grill and walked the dog.  Later we received a call from the RV office and someone called and cancelled, so we can stay in our current camping spot until the 13th!  Woo hoo!  The unsettling news is I called to cancel our reservations at Kingsville and they did not have a reservation for us!  Bad deal if we would have pulled out of here Saturday, arrived at Kingsville and not had a camping spot!  Ugh!  But it all worked out.

So tonight Doreen and I were sitting here discussing our east coast trip, and we were struggling trying to find an appropriate RV park to split the drive between Ankeny and Camp Atterbbury IN.  We were shooting for Galesburg/Peoria area, but nothing really looked all that great.  To complicate matters, for some unknown reason I had plugged in a four night stay in mid-Illinois!  So assuming we can find a descent campground there, what the heck are we going to do in Peoria IL for four night?!  So my mind was wandering a bit and my thoughts reverted to a comment from my good friend and Wingman from the Iowa Air National Guard, Lt Col (ret) Jim Freese. 

Jim and I deployed to Iraq together and are both avid baseball fans.  Jim read a previous post about our trip planning and he asked why we were not traveling via Chicago to catch a Cubs game.  Valid question and really got me thinking.  So just for the heck of it I checked the St Louis Cardinals schedule and guess what!  The Cubs are in St Louis the exact same dates we were going to be in central Illinois!  Well, what a deal! Easy divert from Ankeny to St Louis, then St Louis to Camp Atterbury IN!

So we made reservations at a campground just across the river from Busch Stadium and I got online and bought two tickets for the game.  The tickets will be Doreen's and my birthday presents to each other!

A view from our seats.  11 rows from the field right behind the dugout, third base (Cubs) side!

So we will continue the trip planning and we will use the additional time we now have here at Corpus Christi to see the local sites we have yet to see.  The weather forecast is not the greatest - gale-force winds tonight into tomorrow, colder temps moving back in, etc but we will make the best of it. Much better weather than what they are getting back home in Ankeny!