Coming out of RAGBRAI (Des Moines Register Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa), we should not have been surprised that hanging out with over 30,000 people for a week ended up exposing us to Covid. All three of us - Doug, Alison, and our friend Eric - came down with symptoms that were fortunately mild. Eric made it home to Texas before becoming sick, and Doug and Alison quarantined in Indiana.
While we missed out on dinner with friends from Chicago, attending GenCon (the annual board gamers convention), and seeing our older daughter Madeline there, many others' experience with Covid has been much worse. We continue to keep up with our vaccinations and wear a mask indoors in hopes of keeping any future brushes with Covid mild as well.
Our campground in Indiana during our week of quarantine was at the Indiana State Fairgrounds. We had selected it based on its convenient downtown Indianapolis location, and hadn't even realized that the State Fair would be occurring that week! Ah, well - a fourth thing that we missed.
While quarantining, Doug finished a couple of DIY rig projects: A laptop "desk" for Alison to use in the passenger chair while Doug drives (with space remaining on Alison's lap for a harnessed and belted-in Hershey), and a decorative fill for the gap above the microwave caused by a missing bolt that warped the microwave cabinet frame.
Once we had recovered and finished our quarantine process, we moved on to Elkhart County, Indiana, where we were able to tour the Jayco Manufacturing Facility, specifically the motorhome plant. Back in 2019, we had toured the fifth-wheel manufacturing plants for Grand Design and Jayco, when we were planning on waiting until we retired and then moving into a pick-up truck/fifth wheel rig. There are a lot of similarities in the building process, but it was fun to see the innards of the Jayco motorhome now that we've lived in one for almost three years!
Indiana also helped us out with a couple of daily life needs: Hershey's annual lyme disease vaccination at a VIP Petcare pop-up clinic within a Tractor Supply Co., and Alison's dental exam (for a molar that had lost both its crown and its pinned core) at a local dentist affiliated with a national dental care chain. (She will now wait until we reach Northern Virginia to have her regular dentist begin an extraction/bone graft/implant process.)
From Indiana, we headed north to Michigan's Lower Peninsula, to see if was as beautiful as advertised. (Spoiler: It was!)
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