Current Location: Elkhart County 4-H Fairgrounds, Goshen, Indiana

This morning we all got up and moving early. We all grabbed some tasty breakfast burritos provided by one of the club members. David stayed to help with the sound system during the seminars. Malcolm and Val headed to the vendor area and walked around a bit, then headed back to the trailer.

Later on in the morning, Val headed down to the hall to attend the Beginning Loom Knitting class. Malcolm headed down a little later to attend a presentation by the Thetford (toilets) / Norcold (refrigerators) representatives. Val stepped into the meeting a little late since it overlapped her knitting class. We found a lot of great information on how to care for our toilet and refrigerator. That’s what all the seminars are great for – to pick the brains of the folks that know the most about the items they provide.

After that seminar, it was officially an afternoon off for everyone, so we jumped in the truck and headed first towards Wakarusa. We did a cheap and easy lunch at the McDonalds, then headed on into town to go to the Wakarusa Dime Store – essentially a really big candy store. We bought a sack of various candy treats to take with us. It was a really neat place and we completely forgot to take the coupon provided in our rally welcome packet. Oh well.

Home of the jumbo jelly beans.

So big, they take up three store fronts.

Huge jelly beans.

Aisles of candy.

Put in a pin where you live.

After loading up with candy, it only made sense to head down to Nappanee and get some ice cream at Rocket Science Ice Cream. Here, they take fresh ingredients such as cream and sugar, then mix in the flavors you request (you can choose your combination or pick from some standard combinations). Once all the ingredients are in the metal bowl, they shoot liquid nitrogen into the bowl to super freeze the ingredients while they mix it up. It goes from liquid to ice cream in about a minute.

Super cooling the ingredients with nitrogen.

All nice and frozen.

Nitrogen tank.

The ice cream is super smooth and creamy. And they give you plenty. Val had the Key Lime Pie combination, David selected the Triple Berry and Malcolm had the Orange-Pineapple. Again, we had a discount card provided in our rally packet and completely forgot to use it. We need to get better at remembering stuff like that.

After ice cream, we headed back to the trailer. David wiped out and napped all afternoon. Malcolm assisted Val in putting tags on the baby blankets we brought for the Heartland Cares initiative, which donates blankets and other baby items to a local charity. We ended up with exactly 20 blankets. We’ll take those up on Friday to add them to the collection with everyone else’s donations.

After digging the blankets out of the basement for Val to tag, Malcolm also wiped out and had a nice long afternoon nap. Everyone got up for a spaghetti dinner with some fresh Amish Italian Seasoned bread we bought today. After dinner, Malcolm strapped his GoPro camera on his bike helmet and rode around the fairgrounds filming all the rally trailers that are here (final count was 248 or 249). Depending on what he does with the footage, we’ll post a link here.

We otherwise spent the evening getting the trailer ready to pull out early in the morning to take down to Lippert to get our six-point leveling system installed. We have to be there at 7:00 am and the trailer will be there all day.