Miller's Windmills

Terry is always asking me to photograph windmills that we see in our travels. When we went to Indiana, we saw windmills for about 40 miles from Illinois to Reynolds, Indiana along Highway 24. They were placed in fields where the farmer planted around them.

He bought a little windmill that he placed in our front yard but really wanted one that would generate electricity. The first step was to get a permit from Marion County. Their main requirement was that it must be positioned at least as far away from all buildings as it is tall.

The next step was to get a trencher to dig a hole to fit the wires to the batteries in the basement. There were many trips to Des Moines to find all the poles, batteries and parts that he needed. Then he had to weld the pipes together and paint them. He built forms for the guide wires and center pole to cement into the ground. (I thought that it looked like a sailboat structure on the ground.) Then I drove the car, which was connected to the cables and poles, to bring the structure up in the air.

The nine bladed windmill works!!! It even looks pretty silhouetted in the night sky with stars shinning around it.

Covered Bridges & Reenactments in IN Folks in MI

The weather was perfect for the Mississinewa Reenactment with temps in the 50’s in the morning warming to the early 80’s in the afternoon. Terry wore his tricorn hat and American frontiersman outfit while I wore a chemise, westcot and petticoats. I also had a cape and shawl but in this photo I wore Terry’s hunter’s coat since it was lighter than my cape.

We visited with many of the people that we had seen in other reenactments. In fact, it seemed like we were in the same time warp as five or six years ago when we last visited the Mississinewa River Reenactment. Terry’s childhood friend, Wayne and his friend Liz, came to the reenactment to spend several hours with us.

If you want more details on the reenactment, go to my book “More RV Chuckles and Chuckholes- More Confessions of Happy Campers” and read about reenactments. You will be able to read about this trip in the December issue of Smoke and Fire News too.

We left the RV in a campground and traveled to Michigan by car. Aunt Margie welcomed us to her house where we stayed for two nights in Zeeland. We visited with Uncle Bern and Aunt Jean in Wayland and Aunt Etta in a nursing home in Cutlerville. My cousin Roger, who lost his mother two weeks before we visited, was glad to see us. On the return trip, we stopped to see a flock of sandhill cranes who had flown into a field.

We picked up our RV and traveled to Parke County for the Covered Bridge Festival. The Bridgeton bridge has been rebuilt after an arsonist burned it several years ago. We saw about 30 covered bridges and went to flea markets in Bridgeton, Rockville and Mansfield. I ate such things as pumpkin ice cream, buried beef,( which was slow cooked in a pit for 16 hours), and crullers. I got some pretty fall photos but most of the leaves had muted colors.