Vacation Is Set….In Jell-O

Well, sort of half and half.

Eric got the promotion at his work, although it is more of a lateral move pay-wise, and now gets to work in an area more that deals with the hardware itself (the company’s servers) than with the customer service area. He was told to go ahead and put his vacation request in and that it “should” get approved if it is later on.

So, instead of going to Mountaindale RV Park near Colorado Springs the last of this month, we will arrive there on October 8 and leave on October 14. We’ve never been in Colorado that late in the year, so I got online and found a forum posting where one can find the average temperatures for certain cities. I looked up October for Colorado Springs and it shows an average high of roughly 62 degrees and average lows in the upper 30’s and lower 40’s. Also, they average 3 inches of snow in October.

We may be arriving there too late, but I’m hoping for some good, autumn colors, especially with the Aspens. I was looking at some photos on a favored photo website and the ones that I looked at showed to have been taken in September. So, I guess we’ll wait and see.

We will definitely be getting out the heavier coats for this trip. If you looked at some of the mountain photos in earlier posts, in one with a tent set up, you can see Jo in a pretty heavy coat. That photo was taken in late August, so higher altitudes and later in the year is going to be interesting.

Now, let me mention the “Jell-O” portion of the trip. We’ve put in for two weeks in a row at that time because the Suites Owners International Travel Club’s Central Region rally is being held in Grove, Oklahoma from October 18 through October 23. We attended the October rally last year near Carthage, MO and had a good time, so we really want to make this one as well.

The “Jell-O” part is whether the Colorado vacation part will be expensive enough that we don’t feel we can afford to do the SOITC rally part of the two weeks. We probably won’t know the answer to that question until we actually start back from Colorado. But, I really have my hopes up to be able to go. Those, like so many other RV’ers are some really nice folks.

I won’t post pictures of people without their permissions, so the best I can do is post a few pictures of the Rally area, including a couple of pictures taken in the Joplin area. The rally was held at the Coachlight RV Park, which is south of Carthage, MO.

We were first surprised to see a device designed specifically for campfires. Someone had taken the base from one of those patio fire pits and put a stainless steel washing machine tub inside of it. That is where our campfires were built for the time of the rally. There was very little escaping the tub in the way of sparks and embers, and once the embers are cooled, it was easier to empty. A little scrubbing inside and the stainless steel was bright and shiny again, and ready for use.

A member’s RV.  The white flag has the SOITC logo on it.

The row we were a part of.  There were something like 19 units in the RV park, two rows of which were nothing but Suites models.

 

Our rig…first ever outing with it, received in May…first used in October.

While the sites were a little closer than I like, for a rally, it wasn’t too bad.  We spent most of the time either in the meeting room or at the campfire area.

 

There was a festival of some kind going on in Carthage that weekend, but we didn’t spend a lot of time in Carthage.  I did get a picture of a neat courthouse there.

This is Grand Falls on Shoal Creek, which is located south of Joplin, MO.

 

Not really pretty as it isn’t entirely a natural waterfall.  The following picture was taken of Shoal Creek upriver from the falls and from an old bridge now used as part of a walking trail.