Monday, 21 August to Elgin, IL

Skipped breakfast at the hotel this morning, we both felt like our usual cereal and fresh fruit.  Next chore was to return the rental car and as usual Enterprise kindly dropped us back at the motorhome, great service.  We checked out of the Casino RV Park with a quick stop at the hotel to return our bathroom cards and avail ourselves of a takeaway coffee each.

Our plan today is to head north towards Elgin to have George at Champion Frame and Alignment check out the bushes on the trailing arms, one of which has ‘walked’ out.  We have an appointment there at 1pm so have an hour to kill enroute.  Happily I see a Kohls in a huge mall so that’s where I whiled away some time getting my retail therapy fix.  We are still technically in Chicago!!  Our impression of Chicago was overall good, lots of green space/parks, beaches, river, old architecture and ultra modern tall buildings and a focus on food and music too.  It helped to have awesome weather for our stay!  We didn't see Bad Bad Leroy Brown while we were in south Chicago, but may have seen his brother!

Duly arrive at Champion Frame and George takes a look and suggests the bushes are worn.  He is going to check out the parts availability, they will have to come from Monaco and he will phone us with a quote and time frame to have the repairs carried out.  Good enough!

It was while we are Champion that the total solar eclipse occurred!!  Marsha shared her piece of welding goggle glass with us so we could look at the sun and they had TV on as well so we could see what the rest of the country was seeing.  Unfortunately there was some cloud cover here at Elgin and we are just a bit too far north to see the 100% eclipse, it only got to about 95% because of the angle.  But looking through the glass you could still see the perfect sphere in front of the sun.

This is what we saw pretty much!

So we head off to Paul Wolff Campground, just a few miles away and book in for at least one night, until we know what the plan will be with George.  We stayed here in 2015 when we had the big problem with the trailing arms so it’s nice to be here again without that stress.  It’s 26C, the sun is trying to poke through the clouds and we almost have the whole loop to ourselves, the campground is not very busy at all.