DAY FOUR On Golden Pond. Kentucky not Maine.

When we woke up on Tuesday the breaks on the camper were still out. Dang it. As we took the treacherous road toward town, we could feel the camper pushing us down every hill (which is a lot). Once back to civilization, in a HyVee parking lot, I got on the phone to contact RV repair centers. The first guy only repaired the appliances in RVs. Kind of specialized if you ask me. The second place was crazy busy and suggested we find some fuses to replace the ones in the truckster that control the trailer stuff. I have no idea what the technical terms for any of these things are, but you get the picture.

Now in no hurry, because we thought it had to be fuses, we enjoyed coffee, donuts, and an omelet at Hyvee then mozied down to Lowes for some fuses. Of course, Lowes doesn’t have fuses, so we headed down the road to an O’Reilly store where we bought a large box of every type of fuse available. None of them made the breaks work so off we headed to the RV shop.

After quickly assessing the situation, they assured us that there was no way they could look at it until at least the next day. At this point, either my Jedi mind control or my visible and audible anxiety led the guy to pull it into the shop “for a minute to take a better look.” I don’t really care which it was, all I know is it got the job done, and within a couple of hours our camper breaks were once again functional, but, according to the technician, “Not great. You should probably trade this thing in.” The guy was awesome and went out of his way to get us back on the road toward Golden Pond, KY.

Once we were on our way, my two navigation apps and Jason’s all three disagreed. Again. I’m not sure why he’s so in love with his map app, but I think it’s terrible. It's not even online. In turn, he ceaselessly complains about how my apps (whichever I choose) take us all over the place. Whatever. We took one of my routes. It took us right through the beautiful Missouri countryside on shoulderless, hilly, racetrack roads. Some spots were reverting to gravel. I still maintained that we were saving time, even though secretly I feared for my life, sure that a deer was going spring from the forest right in front of us.

Finally, we reached The Land Between the Lakes and made our way to one of the most beautiful campsites we’ve ever had. Imediatley the boys ditched their clothes for trunks and went swimming at the beach which we have direct access to via a trail from our site. Additionally, the peninsula is home to about 250 species of birds, which sing almost non-stop. When the sun finally set we heard what sounded like a screaming goat. Being almost certain that there are in fact zero screaming goats in the area, we speculate that it may be an owl or a frog. Maybe it will scream again tonight and we can get a better look.

After a long day on the road, we ate noodles and sauce at 9 p.m. and went to bed, where we slept like dead horses.

**As a side note, we’ve repeatedly been warned about the mosquitos and urged to spray up. “The mosquitos are really bad here!!” Yes, we will use the spray, but honestly, these mosquitos are nothing compared to South Dakota mosquitos. Jason and I grew up in Aberdeen where getting carried away by the nasty little beasts was a legitimate concern. We’ve been driven to sit in cars to watch 4th of July fireworks even though we were wearing head to toe clothes drenched in mosquito spray and my dad has had the lawn professionally sprayed for mosquitos, and the association had sent its mosquito spray trucks through the roads. We are familiar with mosquitos. Much more alarming to me are the snakes and weird bugs that we are seeing. Is there a snake spray? I would feel much better if there were.