Minnesota!

We arrived in Minnesota a week ago today, on July 16th.

We are in Rosemount,  a few miles south of Minneapolis.  The ride was scenic on I 35, not bad for an interstate!

We're in Rosemount as guests of Alan and Charlene.  One of the highlights of our travels is making friends along the way.  We met them while camping in Livingston, Texas at Escapees, in June.  Really our cat Nevelle introduced us! We hit it off immediately & stayed in touch once we parted ways.  They are fulltime RV'ers, too. They are taking a break to visit family.   They generously invited us to their family "farm" (not actively farmed now).

What a beautiful spot, wooded (with great birds) over 10 acres.  Another area is where the farming was done.  It's a family place with Alan and three brothers all building small cabins for themselves.  Very rustic and appealing!

Alan at his cabin

On Monday, the 18th, we went to a nice historic park, named Minnehaha, featuring John Harrington Stevens, the first settler of Minneapolis.

John Harrington Stevens

The real highlight was the waterfall.  We took steps to the bottom and viewed them from the top.

During the week,  Charlene and Alan are babysitting their granddaughter, Allison.  She's 7 months young and so sweet.  We loved being around her.



On Tuesday, the 19th, we headed into Minneapolis and the huge Mall of America.  We went by the new Vikings stadium too.

Yikes!

Mall amusement park! Indoors!

Hanging out at the farm:

Today, the 23rd, we are sitting out a big thunderstorm in the trailer!

Ohhh...klahoma!

We left Livingston, Texas on Monday, July 11, after two nights at the Escapees campground.   We were hooked up to water and electricity for the first time since buying the Rpod.  The trailer got a full charge finally.  We didn't have to run the AC, but instead used the fan which was fine, even with the 90+ temperature.

Michael installed the double steps onto the trailer, removing the single step.  It's much easier now to go in and out of Katie 2 with hands full.

 

One of the highlights of our stay at Escapees campground was seeing a swallow-tailed kite in flight very low.  Although it was a quick look, we were both very excited as it was a life bird for the two of us!

https://dinascitywildlife.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/dsc_0516.jpg

The night of the 11th we found an Army Corps of Engineers campground called Clear Springs, which we got to via a long detour. This was on Wright Patman Lake (south of Texarkana, Texas) that flooded much of the campground after the spring rains.  One area was open for camping, but hiking trails were closed due to flooding.

On July 12,  we drove from Texarkana, on 59 north into Alabama and Missouri.  Along the way we stopped at a rock store (as in stones) in Wilton, Arkansas!  A zillion rocks and stones, most so beautiful.  I picked up 2 pieces of malachite, a lovely green stone, that I might have incorporated into another flute one day.

Malachite

There also was a produce stand where we bought these amazingly great tomatoes that we ate right out of the bag!

We continued on, but instead of heading north as we should have been, we discovered we were heading west into Oklahoma!  Turned out this was a terrific mistake to make.  Spontaneously, I turned down Talimena byway and ended up in Winding Stair Mountain National Recreation area.  For $2.50 we stayed at a really nice camping area by ourselves.

Red-spotted purple butterfly

Wednesday,  July 13, we headed to a Walmart for the night in Neosho, Missouri. An uneventful day, but rolling hills along the way made for a nice ride.  We skirted around busy Kansas City.

We arrived in Iowa on the 14th.  Beautiful scenery along the way.  Lots of corn fields! And other vegetation was so green!

Corn as far as you could see!

Sites along the way that make the drives enjoyable: 

Logging trucks everwhere!

Minnesota next!

Dog Magnets

For those of you who follow this blog, you might recall our post about a dog visiting our campsite, now about two months ago.
He was a friendly dog, malnourished, though.  So we fed him cat food and water, and suddenly we had a pet dog. We named him Jet and got him vet checked.  Ultimately we had to find him a new owner as he wasn't friendly toward our Nevelle.  And our cat comes first.

Well, a couple of nights ago, two dogs traveling together decided to make our campsite their own!  These dogs were also happy tail-wagging pups, a male and female.  We couldn't get them to leave, so we gave them water as it was hot and they settled in under the trailer!  Nevelle wasn't too thrilled.

Both dogs were diagnosed by us as having mange.  The poor female's skin was in terrible shape.

We felt badly for them, and felt angry that people are ok with abandoning their unwanted pets in the forest.  How cruel.

So, they were with us 2 days, and yesterday as we broke down our forest campsite, we could see their confusion.  When we later pulled out with the trailer, they stood there watching.  Sad situation.

Odds & Ends

So, yes we are still camping in Texas, but we are departing by Monday, the 11th, heading north to Minnesota and hopefully cooler temperatures.

The days are hot, in the mid- to upper- nineties.  Humidity is up there too.  Very little rain lately.  However the sky is beautiful during the day and super starry at night!

We enjoy lots of butterflies and dragonflies here.  Here's a common buckeye butterfly and a dragonfly that is yet to be identified.

Michael continues to cook outdoors and right now is cooking a BBQ sauce that smells heavenly!  He made homemade granola the other day which tasted great and sliced up a watermelon we bought roadside from the back of a truck - sweet and juicy!

I recently had a new Native American style flute in the key of G crafted for me by a wonderful artist, George Dyson Jr.   It is aromatic cedar and Osage woods and has a gorgeous rich voice.

Nevelle is enjoying the forest and camper as much as we do.  He's an amazing camping and traveling cat! We couldn't be happier with our sweet boy!

One of the challenges of boondocking is not having hook-ups for water and electricity.  Our new rpod has a holding tank for 30 plus gallons of fresh water.  At a campground we can hook up to a water source with our hose and easily fill the tank, but here in the national forest there isn't a water supply.   Well, my brilliant husband remembered how to siphon water from his youth, and that's just what we do to replenish our fresh water supply.

We fill 3 or 4 of our 3.5 gallon waterbricks in town and then hoist them up onto the car roof when we get back to camp.  Then with a hose that Michael fixed up with 2 valves, we get the water flowing from the waterbricks, through the hose, and right into the tank!

We hung a hummingbird feeder with nectar and have had our first visitors!  There are at least 2 hummers and in the photo below, one is to the right of the feeder.

Here is a hummer perched in a tree.

On our day trips we see tons of ranches.  We have seen some longhorns, but I have yet to photograph one.  Here's a cow of a different sort.

Happy July to you!  Will keep you posted on our upcoming travel plans!