On to Minneapolis…

After a couple weeks in Sioux Falls, I had all my chores done and it was time to move on to Minneapolis to visit with my daughter and her SO. She’s been living there for several years and it was about time to pay her a visit. First though, here’s a look at the entrance to where I stayed. Tower Campground. It was a challenge to find how to get into the park when I exited the freeway just a block from their entrance for my first visit. Have to pass the place, in order to get past the barrier in the middle of the street that prevents turns, than make a 180 at the next light to head back. Or do what I did and turn left as soon as I could onto a nice wide street (and there’s a place to do that just a block on), go a block or two on that street, take another left, and so on. That way worked my way back to the main road so I could approach the parks entrance from a westerly direction.

Well, anyway, it’s a nice park and I’ll be staying here whenever I visit Sioux Falls as it’s the only economical RV park in the area. Here’s a shot of my RV space…

And a shot of some of the rest of the park.

But it was time to move on. As I mentioned last time, I’m heading towards Forest City, Iowa where the Winnebago factory service center is. It’s kinda a big deal and lots of people head there every year to get things fixed on their RVs. Since it’s kind of popular, I made my reservation for service last January.  Didn’t take long, about 4 hours, to get from Sioux Falls to this little RV park outside of Minneapolis in Savage, MN. Town & Country RV Park.The sites are a bit tight, and wow, $300 + electric for a weeks stay. I only paid $225 total as they do have some discounts, I think I got the military discount. Dahyum though, they think a lot of their park. I don’t know where they get these outrageous rates over here in the mid-west and east for these old parks, probably due to taxes like room taxes, land taxes, improvement taxes. The Wifi sucked. It was just barely adequate until a couple RVs moved in between me and the only antenna, then it got worse. But I wasn’t here to just complain, I was also here to visit my daughter due north in Minneapolis, and her apartment is about 20 miles from this park. I’m at a park now that’s not better or worse then this one is and it’s $132/week, electric included.

While wandering around on my bike at the park, spotted this old classic. Nice looking rig!  Pretty nice, but not for me. No slides! And I’ve done my share of living in a RV without slides. Not something I want to do again so I’ll content myself with just admiring a nice rig like this from the outside.

And next day went up to my daughter’s (an Scott’s) apartment. Their apartment building is in a nice neighborhood within walking distance of an urban shopping area with the traditional small businesses all clustered together on both sides of a main road into the city.

Mush (Michelle) gets mesmerized by Spock. After dinner we took a walk to the nearby business center and passed over this bike/hike/jogging corridor. Kind of neat that this exists at all in the US, reminded me of the same kind of thing I saw over in Europe. Corridors like this are all over over there. Heh. Hung out for a while at their favorite dive. Mush was soon up on stage singing. Doesn’t do it professionally anymore, now just does it at karaoke places like this one. Wowed the crowd as usual.So while we were talking, the subject of the local Twins baseball team came up. And it turned out they were playing the Seattle Mariners the next afternoon. So I bought tickets and came back to their place the next day. We all took the bus to the stadium and took our seats. If I recall correctly, neither Scott nor Mush had ever been to a game, Mush never had for sure and they were within a bus ride of the stadium! Some people. [Mush informed me that she has been to pro baseball games before, and at the Twins stadium too].

And it downpoured. Crap. We’d checked the weather and the prediction was for rather nice game weather. Turned out not so. So we had an hour or two to wait out the storm.  Grounds keepers get out the covers when it got really heavy. And then the storm cell passed right over the stadium so they asked us all to vacate our seats and head inside. So we did. About 20 minutes later, the cell has passed over so we’re filtering back to our seats. Eventually though, it stopped raining entirely and the game was afoot! Note that it’s rather dark in this picture, I think it was near the 7th inning. The game went to around 11 pm after that rain delay. But I enjoyed the hell out of it. It’s nice to see one of my teams in the flesh actually win. Cost was around $230 for the 3 of us, which wasn’t bad for several hours of entertainment.Scott and Mush enjoying the drizzle. Mush brought sandwiches so we didn’t go hungry and there were plenty of beer and wine distributors nearby so we weren’t thirsty either.Soon enough the Mariners won, which was a surprise as it looked like they were going to lose much of the game, they made a comeback in the 8th. After the game, it was pretty late, and we just took the bus back home, I said my goodbyes and headed back to the RV.

Next two days I just hung around the RV and found nearby shopping centers to replenish my food stocks. And that classic RV decided to leave the next day. Kind of silly the classic RV and the new modern eco car.   I did quite a bit of bike riding around the RV park, there was a little mini-mall a couple blocks away but not much more than that. And the area was flat too so good for the knees and hips but not much of a cardio workout. Still, I enjoyed riding around and did it several times per day. It was at this RV park where my $60 electrical umbilical from the RV to the car disappeared. This gets disconnected when you arrive at a RV park and you want to drive the car. And usually it’s placed in the trunk of the car. When I was ready to head south, I looked for it and didn’t see it anywhere, assumed it was in the trunk buried under something. Since the trip was so short, didn’t bother to look too hard.

Soon I was in Forest City for my appointment at the service center. The drive is only 2 hours but I dawdled as much as I could along the way arriving around 2pm. The spots are free, 50 amp, WES and free very fast Wifi. Pretty nice.

Just behind my RV 8 feet or so is a steep drop off down to a sunken RR track causeway. It’s also a drainage for the heavy rains they get here. I was hoping for some nice night time RR rumbling but it only happened once when I was there, and that was during the daytime. Just beyond that is the main road though you can’t see that in this picture. If I drove that road to the left, it would take me to downtown Forest City, to the right would take me to the giant, and I mean giant rally parking lot that Winnebago maintains. All grass, hundreds of 30/50 amp WE sites with dump stations, a big amphitheater, a large meeting center building. Pretty fair Wifi there too. Apparently, people come here to celebrate their Winnebago RVs once a year. I won’t be doing that. And that’s all for today, I’ll be back soon with another article from Forest City detailing what went well and what went wrong on my RV service visit.

Thanks for reading!