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Published: July 20th 2018
We pulled out of camp around 9:30, making the local Walmart our first stop. We got fuel and then went into the store to pick up a few small items, including fresh raspberries and fresh sweet cherries.Yum!
While we were in the parking lot we made a phone call to Melissa D to welcome her to the blog. Since we had sorta kinda learned a lesson about finding campgrounds in Minnesota during high season yesterday, we called a KOA fairly close to Minneapolis and made reservations for tonight.
On our drive today we crossed the Mississippi River about three times—each time we crossed it, it was a little bit wider! Amazing. We passed many, many lakes which made one of our discoveries later make a little sense once we realized what we were looking at. We saw hundreds (both on the road and at dealerships) of a new type of RV that we had never seen before. They were very peculiar looking with pointy noses, and wheels that looked as if they would fold up into the wheel wells (as it turned out, they do). Could NOT figure it out until we saw one parked at a McDonalds where
we had pulled into to get something to drink. It is an ice fishing rig! I posted a picture of the one we saw below. Apparently (refer to note on many, many lakes!) Minnesotans are quite big on ice fishing in the winter time. These rigs are used for that, and then as RVs in the summer months. I would think that the old time ice fishermen would think these folks were a bunch of wimps, but the things sure did look nice!
We saw more traffic today than we have seen since we were on I-40 heading to Arkansas to meet Laura and Tom. It was a little bit of a culture shock.
We pulled into KOA Minneapolis North West/Maple Grove Campground at 4:00. It looks good, but the lot we were put on for the night lacks quite a bit putting it charitably. It is not level, the water and electric hookups are on the wrong side of the RV, the wifi is VERY weak (you likely won’t get this until sometime tomorrow), and the water isn’t the best we have had on the trip. That doesn’t make for a fun time getting set up after
a day of mostly driving to say the least. We haven’t been able to find a company that does tours into Minneapolis, so we are going to just do our thing tomorrow by driving into town and possibly going the the Mall of America. After that, we will head south again.
We drove 213 miles today.
Sent from Patricia's iPad Air 2
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Lora Carbary
non-member comment
Get out of that camp site
What on earth were they thinking giving you guys such a crappy site. Didn't they know John and Pat Smallman???? Just kidding you know that. Marla would have know what that was. I will tell her all about it. Safe Travels tomorrow and enjoy the cooler temps if you have them. We are all fine down here and glad you are coming south again. Love you both. Lora