RVing With a Purpose

Christmas in July

Monday, July 29, 2024

We didn’t post anything yesterday because we have been busy visiting with friends as we have been traveling. It’s been great to move around at a pace where we can make contact with some of our RVing friends. We thank them for welcoming us into their homes and taking the time to visit with us.

When we last posted we were back in Middlebury after visiting Indiana Dunes. We then drove to the Detroit area and then began making our way north. Today we stopped at Frankenmuth, Michigan and visited Bronner’s, “the largest Christmas store in the world”. The store was pretty amazing and if we were not full time RVing, we would have probably been even more interested in all the great Christmas items, but our actual favorite thing about that visit was all the things outside the store. There is a beautiful chapel and several Nativity settings around the property. So nice to see.

Bronner’s Christmas Wonderland. We appreciate the way they spell CHRISTmas and the message on their sign.

The Silent Night Chapel was one of our favorite features

There are several signs leading up to the chapel, each containing the lyrics of the song in several languages.

One of several outside nativity sets

The store sells ornaments for almost every profession and occupation.

There are also ornaments for every field of public safety and branch of military.

We bought an Advent puzzle as a Christmas present to ourselves. There are 24 small boxes of pieces inside the package and we are supposed to only put one little box of pieces together a day for the first 24 days in December. We’ll see.

While in Frankenmuth we also enjoyed the cruise on the Bavarian Belle – a flat bottomed river boat on the Cass River. We had some really good ice cream in fresh made cones and enjoyed walking around all the shops.

The crew has to lower the top part of the smokestacks to cross under the bridge. The smokestacks are just decorative since the boat is now powered by diesel instead of steam.

Using the rope and lever the smokestacks can be easily lowered and raised by one crew member.

The paddle wheel is not just for show. It actually propels the boat. The captain was very skilled with it.

From Frankenmuth we drove to Ludington to get ready for tomorrow. We both enjoy spontaneous travel and today was a good example. Fun day and we would recommend these stops to anyone up this way.

Indiana Dunes National Park

Saturday, July 27, 2024

When we realized just how close we were to Indiana’s only National Park, Indiana Dunes National Park, we decided to make a road trip. It only took about 1.5 hours to drive to the park that is in the far northwest corner of the state. As usual we first stopped at the visitor center, watched the informational movie, talked to two rangers and picked up a map. This park is another “different” park. The National Park surrounds the Indiana Dunes State Park and the two parks share the one visitors center. The park also surrounds two steel mills and a power plant with a cooling tower that looks like a nuclear cooling tower, but it’s not. From the visitor center, we were off to the recommended Cowles Bog Trail. With the additions we made, it was a strenuous 5-mile hike. It was recommended because the trail was designated as a National Natural Landmark in 1965 due to the outstanding plant diversity. We were pretty tired by the time we completed this hike, so we ate some lunch, took a break in BB – enjoying our air conditioning.

Early in the hike we commented about how easy the trail was and what good time we were making. (We had to keep moving to beat the mosquitoes.)

And then we started hitting these steep uphill climbs with deep, loose sand.

As we were walking we could see the diverse plant life and appreciate the beautiful remote landscape …

… until we turned around and looked the other way.

We made our hike a little longer by walking along the beach for a while.

After some rest, we hiked the 5pm ranger led hike to Mt. Baldy. It was interesting to hike because it is a wandering sand dune meaning that it moves or shifts every year and is called a living dune. Last year it moved a little over four feet. It has buried a number of large oak trees in sand over the past few years. The strong northerly winds move the sand. We had an excellent and very knowledgeable ranger, so we really enjoyed this hike. The Visitor Center welcomes people to overnight in the parking lot, so we took them up on the offer, along with 7 other RVs.

Our second hike of the day was much easier and more interesting.

How Mt Baldy has changed over the years

Mt. Baldy is expected to cover much of the base of these oak trees by next year. Several roads and buildings have already been buried.

These dead oak trees will decay from the inside and form dangerous voids in the dune. The NPS now prohibits climbing the dune for safety reasons.

Ranger Penny is hopeful that the new grass growing on Mt. Baldy will slow its movement.

Some of our hiking companions on the ranger led hike. We spent a good bit of time waiting.

This national park is unusual for allowing RVs to stay overnight in the Visitor Center parking lot, but we really appreciated it since we wore ourselves out hiking.

Tour Of The Brinkley RV Factory

Friday, July 26, 2024

We safely arrived back in Middlebury after the wonderful experience at the Blueberry Patch. There was visiting, hiking the trails, etc. On Thursday, 7/25, we were pleased to take a tour of the Brinkley RV factory. We love factory tours. We will do a factory tour of just about anything. For the non-RVers, Brinkley is one of the newest RV manufacturers and has built four huge factory buildings in Goshen, IN. and are building what most consider a higher quality RV, using some of the newest manufacturing processes. Brian was our tour guide and he answered all our questions, allowed us inside some of the RVs and walked us through the construction process from beginning to the RV going out the factory door. One of the first impressive things we noticed was that all their factory buildings are air conditioned. Everything was clean and comfortable. Brinkley feels that their employees can do better work and produce a better product when working in a temperature-controlled environment. Some of the other RV factories actually have to shut down production when the temperature is too high for the employees to safely work. I suspect Brinkley has some happy employees. Brinkley doesn’t do tours during the workday due to safety concerns but since they were not working during our visit, it allowed us to walk around and look at things as we wanted. Many of the Brinkley work force are Amish, so the workday begins at 6:00 am so that employees can get home to their farms, livestock, gardens, etc. early afternoon. It was a great tour. We thank Brinkley for allowing us to tour and take pictures. Now where can we visit next?

Brian showed us the internal components of the frame.

The roofs are built upstairs and placed on the RVs by a crane.

Some of the finished products

After our tour we ate a delicious dinner here.

We also got a fresh blueberry pie to go.

The Blueberry Patch

Thursday, July 25, 2024

We left Cuyahoga National Park on Monday afternoon (7/22/24) headed back to Middlebury, IN for a visit and decided to stop for the night at The Blueberry Patch, a Harvest Hosts site in Mansfield, OH. This turned out to be one of our favorite Harvest Hosts stays. It is a 130 acre blueberry farm with restaurant, bakery and gift shop, as well as a U-pick farm.

With these delicious looking berries, we can understand why there was a steady stream of people coming in to pick them.

Nicest gift shop we have seen at a Harvest Host site

Some of our purchases