Parker’s dad is awesome with woodworking. He has made numerous dressers, toy chests, night stands, tables, candlesticks etc. So we asked him if he could help us make some cabinets, benches, a sliding table, and a wall to close off our “garage.” And man, did he go above and beyond. We decided since we don’t have the tools or the space in Denver the easiest way to complete our build out would be to drive the van to the Caskey Lake House on Center Hill Lake in Smithville, TN as we already had plans to spend a week there with Parker’s family before taking off on our trip.

It’s a 18 hour, 1300 mile haul through East Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Southern Illinois, AND Kentucky. We downloaded the podcasts Broken Harts and Without Warning and set off. We stopped in Kansas City for some KC BBQ at Q39 thanks to a rec from one of our friends and it was fast and those burnt ends were so frickin good!

We drove until around 10 pm before stopping at our first free campsite that we found on freecampsites.net. We camped at the Danville Conservation Area an hour outside of St. Louis, MO and was perfect. We drove 5 miles off the interstate onto a gravel road. There were 5 individual campsites with pit toilets, but we camped at the parking lot at the end of the gravel road. We were the only ones there and it was so peaceful and quiet.

After putting in a few hours of work on the van in the mornings we had plenty of play time out on the lake with the fam.

We were bummed to leave the lake and start the drive back but it was pretty smooth sailing. We stopped in St. Louis, MO for tacos at Mission Taco thanks to another one of our friend’s recommendations. The tacos were delicious. Our favorites were the Baja Fish and Shrimp. I will say their hot sauces are not for the faint of heart!

On our way back we camped just past Columbia, MO at Harriman Hill Access. This campsite had 6 sites, pit toilets, a few firepits and river access. It was quite muddy as it had just rained but worked perfectly for us. It was right next to I-70 though so there was some highway noise but we didn’t notice it much while sleeping in the van.