Tuesday August 11th 2020

The day began hazy and humid. As the temperature climbed the haze gave way to blue sky with lots of fluffy white clouds. By mid afternoon the clouds took over the sky in the form of storm clouds. Thunderstorms were in the area from 2PM on, but they didn’t produce any real rain or wind until after 6PM. It has been raining consistently since.

I got caught up on laundry today. Ever since the pandemic began, I’ve been behind on laundry. Two things have been conspiring to make doing laundry difficult. First is finding acceptable facilities. I’m being a little picky on cleanliness and occupancy of the laundry facilities. The bigger issue is having enough change to feed the machines. It takes too much planning to acquire quarters. Some of the campground office/stores aren’t dealing in cash, so I can’t ask for change. I didn’t have either of those problems here.

The laundry is in an eleven by seven room behind the restrooms in the flood mobile facilities. There are two washers and two dryers and best of all they are free. It is not often that I find a free laundry in my travels. Many campgrounds see the laundry as a source of revenue or an opportunity to out source the headache of maintaining the machines. I showed my appreciation for the free facilities by doing three loads of laundry. Later in the week I may strip the bed. The blanket could use a good washing.

In between the laundry and the rain I continue to watch the traffic in the river. I still haven’t seen anything other than tugs and barges. There are lots of different configurations of barges and tugs from singles to massive strings of barges. The other surprise is the water level in the river. It has gone down several feet since I arrived here on Sunday. There was water all the way across to the far shore on Sunday. This morning there were sand bars in the area from the center line to the far side. I don’t know everything that goes in to a river level forecast, but the current forecast has the water level dropping over the next month or so.