We all awoke comfortably rested from our first night’s sleep in the RV. I slept on the sofa bed and Branic slept on the convertible dining table while Jed and Katose both shared the queen size bed in the bedroom. All of us got a great night sleep and we realized that we will have no problems in getting enough rest this summer because of how cozy our Fleetwood is. After waking up full of energy, we were all looking forward to having a fantastic drive to Indianapolis. We wanted to move on from yesterday’s 66-mile “detour,” which was a slap in the face in getting our tour off to a good start. (We want to go WEST, Katose!) The day, however, turned out to be a hell of a lot more trouble than we wanted.

Being the consistent people that we are, we managed to get lost for the second day in a row. Never mind the fact that we only had to stay on I-70 for 560 miles to get to Indianapolis. We never noticed that we accidentally merged onto the wrong highway, and it wasn’t until we noticed that we were approaching Akron, did we realize that we had spent the entire day driving on the wrong highway. After a lot of over-analysis and map studying, we managed to track our way back to I-70 and make up for lost time.

While we were busy getting lost, we had other frustrations to deal with. The generator which powers all three of our laptops, cameras, and other technical equipment, kept quitting on us all day. The laptop which has an interactive atlas and directions to our destinations, was rendered useless every time the generator quit on us. This was hard on us because we were trying to figure out where we were when we were lost and to find our way back to 70. We were baffled at first, because the propane measurements read that the tank was still 3/4 full. We finally figured out later that even if the propane tank is full, the generator still relies on the amount of gasoline left in the RV. As a result of this experience in which we pulled over twice for, and spent a lot of time staring at the digital readout of the propane tank, we’d like to share a tip for all you RVers out there: No Gas = No Generator. It took us the entire day to figure that out. All we had to do was stop at Amoco and the generator was up and running again.

Considering our luck when it comes to navigation in the past two days, and the immense amount of bugs’ whose lives tragically ended when they collided with our mammoth 32-footer traveling 70 m.p.h., we still managed to turn this trying day into a successful one. We entered the Indianapolis city limits barely behind schedule, and with us frantically changing clothes and brushing our teeth while still traveling on 70, so that we would not look like we just spent the last 12 hours driving across three states. We successfully made up more than two hours of the time we lost when we took the wrong highway earlier in the day.

We pulled in the parking lot of the Greater Indianapolis Deaf Club to an excited crowd of 117 people who were proud to be the hosts of the first stop of our tour. There, we dined on free pizza, courtesy of Sprint, and learned about the history of the GIDC from Sarah Wooten, former president and long-time contributor of the Deaf club. We were also greeted with a shiny new Harley owned by Deaf Indianapolis resident Jay Krieger. The Harley was parked in front of our RV and Jay enjoyed occasionally revving it up for the crowd. There, we were told that more than 30 Deaf bikers from Indiana were planning on gathering at the DeafNation Expo on this Saturday, so we are counting on some awesome photo-ops with them and their bikes!

After we finished meeting the great people of GIDC, we parked the RV here at the Indiana State Fairgrounds which is just across the street from the Indiana School for the Deaf. We are betting on getting another great night’s sleep after our long day, and even though we feel like we have been through Heaven and Hell and back, we still achieved our goal for today. We wanted a fantastic drive to Indianapolis, and we got it…

… never mind how long that drive was.