285e Wentzville Mo road trip

I suppose we could have left sooner but on Monday I was going to go to Wentzville Missouri to return my son Ben's air conditioner. He bought it from a company called E-Trailer. He had bought the wrong model number and he was told that it would cost $250 shipping and a $100 restocking fee. Since we were heading that way anyway I looked at maps and realized that when we were in Mayfield Kentucky we were only about 2 hours away from Wentzville Missouri. It’s near St Louis and I told him just put in the back seat of the truck and whenever we get done with the RV thing I'll just return it for you. Needless to say, he was getting down to the last few days of the grace period to return it. I had to do it by a Tuesday deadline so Monday was the day. If it not been for that I suppose we would have moved on maybe even over the weekend but that was my reasoning for staying. It also gave us time to get some of the stuff out of the middle of the floor and strip the old RV of goodies. I was running out of time but after all the pain I endured getting the microwave in New Mexico I wanted to snag that also. I resisted. Most of the stuff I took would not seem that obvious. Removing the microwave might leave such a gap in the kitchen I thought it would look as bad as taking the kitchen sink. I don’t how my brain does this because there is an 18” square hole in the side of the RV where the water heater was and no batteries which prevent the salvage driver from even raising or lowering the rig. In my mind, they wouldn't notice all that mischief but if you take the portable plug-in microwave it's on.

Emotionally returning this for Ben certainly saved money but if it cost me $100 worth of fuel and $100 for a hotel room. Since it wasn’t so free after all I told Ben he needed to pitch in on the expenses of my transportation costs and such. With all that behind us, it went well and I headed on back very next morning. I got there in the evening it was snowing and by the time I got done with the E-Trailer thing at 10 or noon. I headed on back and got home at maybe 4 in the afternoon to where Miss India was.

On the way back I rode through a little town called Cairo Missouri. I looked and they have a population of 2000. It was a real depressing-looking place. I assume at some point they handled freight or for some reason people lived here. There were a lot of large warehouse-looking buildings all abandoned. Driving down the main street there were 30 or 40 storefront type businesses all boarded up. I imagine the social services building was the only viable building that looked open. I felt real sadness for the people driving through there and knew I would need to find out what happened here.

This is what the internet said.

SITUATED AT THE FLOOD-PRONE CONFLUENCE OF the Mississippi River and the Ohio River, at the southernmost point in Illinois, the port town of Cairo (pronounced CARE-o) boomed along with the steamboat industry. When railroads crisscrossed the United States some of the steamboat traffic was subtracted, but Cairo was also an important station point along numerous train lines.

Today, however, a walk or drive through Cairo will find it eerily empty. The historic downtown area, once bustling and busy, is now filled with crumbling brick and plywood-covered windows. Cairo has been decaying for decades, and currently, the business district is virtually totally boarded up, tumbling down, or razed. The deterioration has slowly made its way “uptown” (northwest) into residential neighborhoods as well.

The town has mostly been abandoned because of its economic desperation, though its history of racial tension and periodic flooding certainly didn’t help. The Civil War Reconstruction period brought a migration of formerly enslaved people to Cairo. Racial tensions were always high in the community, but as the shipping and ferrying industries declined, jobs grew more scarce and the racial unrest intensified.

In the mid-1960s, the alleged police murder of a young Black soldier on leave in Cairo prompted protests and riots, and the National Guard was briefly activated. In response to perceived threats from the Black community, the white community formed a civilians’ militia called the “White Hats.” Predictably, the group was more focused on quelling Black protesters than on improving the community as a whole.

The racial unrest and economic shortsightedness continued, and everything in Cairo organically declined over the decades to come. Some of Cairo’s Black citizens left for more progressive pastures. Many business owners—and a few rather large industries—were economically forced to board up shop. The town’s population, which had been over 15,000 at its peak in the 1920s, had dipped to 6,000 by the ’80s. As of 2010, it was down to roughly 2,000.

The local government has attempted to revive the city through now-racially integrated historic preservation initiatives, but most of these have failed. The only cultural institutions that have really survived are the few state-owned Victorian manors and the Cairo Public Library. Much of the rest of the town has been abandoned.

Columbus Belmont state park continued

Because it was very cold, they had turned off the water to the state park so we had electricity but no water. We had a nearly full tank so we were ok for the first night.

After a few days, we had used it down a little bit but not only that I wanted to test out my brand-new bathtub. We moved the RV down to another site over towards the bath house there where the RV sites are parallel to the road right in front of the bath house.

This was the only source of water in the park and they had what seemed to be a 50 ft water hose at the spigot. If I added all my hoses together it would be 125 feet. When coupled together this would give me unlimited water and filled the tank and filled the bathtub. It was a bit of a trick to get a good hot bath because the water heater is now gas and it will make hot water indefinitely as long as you have propane. I started running it but the water in the hose was so cold like 25 to 28 degrees the volume of water passing through the water heater too fast to get hot. It was a bit of a learning curve and now that I've been on the other side of it I’ve learned to slow down the flow to where it contacts the flame long enough to get good and hot.

I managed to get my first hot bath going and of course, that was a big part of why we wanted this RV. It has a soaking tub in front. Eventually, I want to get a more rounded jacuzzi type that's a full oval. This one is a little small in volume. It's still a nice hot bath it's just I don't care for that design of tub but that will come much later. India had mentioned we're not going to do any remodels until you can start and finish all in one session. The lady has spoken. She doesn’t want the new rig to fall into the state of the old rig.

It was wonderful having a nice hot bath and so we had the whole place to ourselves but it took me a little while to learn how to be legal. Up at the bathhouse, there's a self-pay envelope and some directions. I think it was 25 and I so you just write a check and put it in the envelope self-pay honor system. I would see a park ranger ride through once a day and I would wave or something that's about it. We never actually spoke to anyone while we were there.

We finished our little decompression time and felt done with stripping the old RV. Part of the agreement with the insurance company was to leave the RV at Mayfield and allow a towing contractor to take it to a salvage yard. With all this done we wanted to get on towards Florida and did.