D-Day -1

---

We made it! And, I trust we are all tucked in for the night by now in our spiffy new "Minnie Winnie's".This will be short and sweet as it's been a long day.

Dorrie & I flew into Minneapolis from Naples on Thursday and met up with Tom & Peggy who had flown in the same day from Virginia. We met for dinner at City Grill at the Mall of America for a great meal. Al & Sue flew into Kansas a week earlier to attend a wedding and met up with us today in Iowa.

Dorrie & I spent about 10 hours between yesterday and today visiting just about all 520 stores in the Mall of America and managed to ride one of the many roller coasters with Tom so that we could impress upon our grandchildren that getting old is only a state of mind (not!). Check Mall of America off "bucket list".

At 5pm today, the bus hired by Great Alaskan Holidays picked us up at the Minneapolis airport for a 2 hr. ride to Forest City, Iowa. Ride was smooth once we got out of Minneapolis rush hour traffic. Ride was through mostly flat farmland with farmers tilling fields getting ready to sow their crops in very rich looking soil...lucky us! We arrived at 7 pm and were greeted by Great Alaskan Holidays crew who unloaded our luggage, delivered the keys to the RVs which were all lined up in a field with our names on them. We spent some time familiarizing ourselves with 33' RV and unpacking suitcases and trying to find places to put everything. I had a problem getting our generator started and Great Alaskan staff made a few adjustments...trust it's all set. We'll know better in morning.

We have orientation at 8am tomorrow morning and then we're on the road. If all goes as planned, our 1st stop tomorrow night will be in Oacoma, SD at a campground right along the Missouri River (fingers crossed).

I'm writing this post on my iPhone so only have couple of pics, the rest are on my camera which have to be transferred to PC first...too late for that.
All for now.
Quentin

---