Altoona, IA - Around Town

OK, it’s been 2 years as full-timers, we have a pretty good idea of what we need and what we don’t - now it’s time to clean out the stuff in that latter category. Actually, we don’t have much to clean out but there are a few items that we need to find another home for. In a home, you can probably buy forever, there’s always more storage - just put it in the basement. Or, if not, how about the attic? I’ve seen lots of homes like that. Just find another cubby for the old stuff. In an RV, the rule is: one item in, one item out. So, here we go.

Here’s Nancy with one our last Mr Movies sweatshirt, in front of Goodwill. It’s going.

It’s in perfect condition and was of good quality since counter near door and we didn’t want anyone to get cold on the job, although we were moving so fast sometimes, that we were all in t-shirts even on the coldest day. Our counter was up at the front door and, to get around it, customers had to go through a sensor system. Did we have people try to get through our alarm system with movies? Does the sun rise in the East? Unfortunately, we did have people try to get out of our store with movies in their purses, under their jackets, under the vests of their 3-piece suits, in their baseball caps (we had some small merchandise for sale), you name it, they tried it. We always tried to approach it with an ‘oops, could you please walk through our sensor system again? Looks like it went off while you were going through.’ The guy with the 3-piece suit, after being asked to walk through again, whipped the movie out from under his vest, said, ‘Is this what you want?’ and then walked out.

Hmm, I got a bit distracted from the main topic here: the clean out. Short story: we made several trips to Goodwill and a few trips to the trash bin in back of the campground. Hey, LOOK, I’ve got some space for some new things now. Whoo-pee. Let’s go shopping.

Right next to the campground is an unused railroad track which use to run all the way to Kansas City from Chicago. Here’s Nancy standing near a mile marker showing 237 miles still to go to KC.

Two years ago when we were at this campground, the train tracks were rife with weeds and bushes covered much of it. We walked it, sure, but it was not like walking a trail, we strode from tie to tie through the weeds. Last year, they put in part of the trail and we could walk on the trail for part of it. Now, the trail is complete and we’ve used it lots. Perfect way to get in our day’s mileage. And, what a beautiful trail it is. Some of it goes between fields and we get to see the corn turn from green to golden and then get harvested. Much of the trail goes through a tree-lined way, over some of the original rr bridges. The trail gets used well, too. As it was said in ‘Field of Dreams’ ‘If you build it, they will come.’ We haven’t been on the trail even once when we weren’t passed by bikes and other walkers on the trail. A great amenity for the campground.

When we moved from a 1-acre wooded lot in New Hampshire to the Midwest in 1985, the first thing we noticed was that we could see fronts moving in. On our wooded lot, we could only see the sky in the tree-cleared circle that surrounded our house, which was small. In the Midwest, you can see the whole horizon from East to West and North to South. Those fronts extend across the sky from edge to edge. And, the cloud formations you can see in the Midwest - beautiful. Here’s one we saw a few days ago as we were walking out of the campground on our daily walk.

We need to update our passports so, first stop, into Costco to take some new pictures. These two look like criminals. Put the orange jumpsuits on them and haul them off.

One of our errands this trip back to Iowa was for me to get some new glasses. The progressive tints on mine had worn out over 2 years (I’m not sure how this happened) and my prescription had changed enough to warrant new glasses. I have vowed not to go back to the company that made our last glasses since they messed up the order so much on both my glasses and Gary’s such that we got them on the day before we left the area for our winter journey. They had been promised 4 weeks earlier. So, I looked for a new company. Target had a 1/2 price lens sale which looked promising.

So, here I am, in Target, perusing all the choices I have for frames.

Speaking about accessories like glasses, here’s a poster of Johnny Depp with a cool turquoise bracelet on - just like my cool as Johnny Depp husband, Gary. They could almost be twins - oops, except for those tattoos.

We were walking out of the local grocery store when a car pulled up and parked in front of us. The driver, a woman, was waving like mad. ‘Do you know who this is?’ both Gary and I asked each other. ‘Nope’ was the answer. We don’t know any one in this town. Then Jolene got out, one of my favorite people from Wells Fargo. Haven’t seen her for a year, the last time I stopped in to see my old friends form Wells. What a great surprise.