Noise, Crowds, Peace and Quiet and Family

We survived the 7 days of Common Ground and moved on to Country Thunder in Twin Lakes, WI.

Some of my favorite Common Ground people!

Common Ground Office Staff

Matt, one of the East Gate Managers

Gayle and Emily, East Gate Managers

Gayle is a teacher at the local college, teaching Event Planning.  Emily and Matt are two of her students who got VERY practical experience running the east entrance gate.   They were fun to work with and did a GREAT job!

Stevie Ray Bacon, Chachi, Buster and Boris manning the EMU
The names are a story for another time!

Common Ground's last day was Sunday with Sublime With Rome as the last act. 

Monday morning, we picked up the girls at the boarding place, hooked up the trailer, said goodbye to all our new festival friends and headed west to Twin Lakes, WI to get started on Country Thunder.  We drove through Chicago on our way...always a pleasure (not).  Bad roads, high tolls, lousy traffic.  At least it was a bright sunny day.

This is one of our favorite festivals because we get to see some of our favorite festival friends from Country Stampede.  Laurie, Butch and Joanne, Johnny B and then our new festival friends who also work the Country Thunder in Arizona.  Marty and Dick, who run traffic and parking are always a hoot!  Made some new friends..Joe, Mike and Connie with the gate services company. Sorry, no pictures with them...and not many pictures at all.  Guess I took too many last year! :)

Field of Port a Potties....View out our back window before the
all the campers arrived.

This is an additional stage on the grounds for something called "Electric Thunder".  VERY loud.  Our trailer was close enough that we could feel the thump thump of the music as movement.

After almost 3 weeks of noise and crowds we just wanted some peace and quiet.  We found a little, quite nice RV park in Sycamore, IL with a couple of ponds.  Monday we took the looonnnnggg drive of 53 miles to Sycamore, checked in, parked, set up and started the relaxing.  Aaaaahhhhh.....

We were pretty near Dave's sisters, Judy and Janet so they came to spend some time with us both days.  We really enjoyed their visit and have decided that this should be a post Country Thunder stop each year.

We left Sycamore on Thursday and headed for southern Illinois.  Since we have about a week before we meet the kids in Lake of the Ozarks we decided to find an RV park near Dave's sister Frankie.  We haven't seen her and her husband since her daughter Stacey got married 3 years ago.  To top it off Stacey and Eric gave Frankie and Dave their first grandchild this year and we were anxious to meet him.

Edward David Kreher

We always say that the Arnold's may not do much else well, but we sure make beautiful babies!!  Stacey and Eric are no exception.  He is one handsome guy!

Fridays for Frankie are Eddie day, so we arrived at the perfect time to spend the afternoon with him and Grandma.  Then she and Dave came out to visit us at the trailer on Saturday and we went over to Stacey and Eric's for dinner on Sunday.  We have taken the last two days to get things ship shape around here and will go over to say our goodbyes to the Yuill and Kreher clan tomorrow.  We sure have enjoyed spending time with them after so long.  We will probably have to make this an annual stop too!

Thursday morning we leave to meet ALL of our kids and grand kids for a long weekend at Lake of the Ozarks.  We are looking VERY forward to that.  Then a week at Kathy's and Tim's and then make our way north to Rockford for On the Waterfront at the end of the month.

So, now you are all caught up.  It seems that I have really gotten out of the habit of keeping my blog.  Need to change that.  Again.  I may or may not get anything blogged while we are enjoying our grand kids but will try to keep motivated to keep you informed.  Stayed tuned for pictures of our family vacation and other things.  I can see the thrill in your eyes already. :)