Day # 61 - Casey, IL

We camped last night just east of Kansas City (on the Missouri side of the city) and yesterday had been a long day. I didn’t want to push as hard today as I did yesterday. Still, as the hours rolled away, I found myself looking at the GPS more and more often. This morning, I had entered in our home address as the “destination” into the GPS. Hallie the GPS (go back a couple of days if you want to know why the GPS is named “Hallie”) displayed the estimated time we would arrive home. At 5:30 tonight Hallie said we only had 4 more hours until we were home. It was tempting. But I was tired, and after 2 months of traveling, what is setting up the camper one more time going to hurt. Besides, the girls were getting antsy and I knew the KOA in Casey, IL had a nice campground from the pictures I had looked at last night. (I checked on a couple of campgrounds on the route home last night).

So when the exit for Casey, IL came up, Missy and I decided to go ahead and stay the night. Besides, I knew we had enough VIP credits left over from all of our KOA stays this summer that it wouldn’t cost much. I was right. Total cost to camp tonight with taxes and fees = $11.86.
As we have come to expect during the work week, the campground was almost empty. When planning this trip, all of the information we read in books and on the web told us we had to make reservations every night we wanted to stay in a campground because they all get full during the summer. This has simply not been true. In fact, even on the weekends, most of the campgrounds we have stayed at have had sites available. The exceptions were the Oregon State campgrounds and the San Francisco KOA campground over 4th of July weekend. Other than that, we could have easily not made a single campground reservation this summer.

We requested a site near the playground and got one right across the gravel drive. The kids played while Missy did our nightly set-up. While both of us are sick of having to set the camper up, we have gotten pretty efficient at it. I can have all the outside stuff done in under 30 minutes and Missy can have the inside done in about 20 minutes.

After we set-up, we decided to go back into Casey for dinner. We purposely didn’t re-stock on groceries knowing that we would be home tomorrow, but we ran one day short on dinner foods. So, we decided to go to the local Dairy Queen for dinner. Hamburgers and Onion rings for Missy and me and Hotdogs and chicken fingers for the kids. And of course, ice cream for dessert. Our conversation focused mostly on what everyone will do first when we get home. Sarah wants to hug all of her stuffed animals that she hasn’t seen in 2-months. Abby wants to play on the computer. AJ does not really understand that being home means no more camper for a while. Missy wants to take a long shower in a “real” sized tub. I want to relax on the couch without someone asking me to move or crawling on top of me. But everyone is excited about getting home

After dinner, we got the kids to bed and were in bed ourselves shortly after. It does feel weird to be going home tomorrow.