So the sway bar saga continues. We waited at Kelderman’s until 5:45pm for the UPS man to come back, an hour and a quarter after the shop had closed. Tom had the old sway bar out, and thought it would be quick and easy to install the new one, which is obviously much beefier than the old one.
I got everything stowed in the camper and got ready to move since Tom said it would just take a few minutes to install, when I heard an emphatic, “Oh shit.” I jumped out and Tom showed me that the holes on the new sway bar were too small for the bolt. The sway bar is hardened steel, and couldn’t be drilled with Tom’s drill, and the shop was closed until Monday, so we were out of luck. Instead of heading out with the new sway bar, Tom put on the old one again, and we packed the new one in the back, where it can ride until Monday when we find an open machine shop to drill out the holes. We got on the road about 6:30, heading northeast to see how far we could go. We got to see a beautiful sunset, as well as a beautiful moonrise, and ended up spending the night in a Walmart parking lot just west of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
This morning, we hit the road early heading for Madison, the capital of Wisconsin. We crossed the Mississippi at Dubuque before noon, so we really feel like we’re heading east.
We headed into Madison on the city streets, wanting to see more of the city than the expressway. The first thing we noticed was a sea of people, all wearing red, and we realized that we were driving through a massive tailgate party for a football game. We continued towards the capitol, and noticed that many of the streets were blocked off, and then we began to see runners. It wasn’t until we were almost to the capitol that we saw the end of the course, and realized that we had driven into a triathlon in downtown Madison. Between the triathlon and the football game, we couldn’t find anyplace remotely suitable or legal to park our rig, so we picked our way around the surrounding streets and snapped a few photos, and headed out of town. Despite not getting a good look at the capitol and the surrounding grounds, we’re putting Madison in second place behind Des Moines on our capitol ranking, just because it was so great to see a city actually being enjoyed by the people.
We’re now in a Cabela’s parking lot outside of Madison, getting ready to head into Chicago tomorrow to visit family. We were going to stay in a park somewhere between here and there, but when I started looking at availability for tonight, which is Saturday, I found that all campgrounds under $50 are full, and we didn’t build this boondocking rig to pay $50 when we don’t need any services and only need a place to park. Parking at Cabela’s is free - and they have lots of cool stuff that will help us in our nomadic life.