Ottawa to North Dakota
Saturday, May 16th, 2009It is Saturday May 16, 2009 at 8 am. We are now sitting in Jamestown, North Dakota, which is about halfway between Fargo and Bismark.
The last several days have been spent in transit.
On Wednesday morning as we were leaving our Ottawa campground, we went to the camp dump station to unload our grey water. Milly noticed we hadn’t put down our TV Antenna. We raised half the trailer so Fred could lower the antenna. In the process, we raised the trailer tongue onto its “stand”. We started to drive off without lowering the trailer off the tongue “stand”. The crunch, crunch told us we were dragging the “stand”.
We drove to Sault Ste Marie, Ontario where we pulled into a Walmart at about 7 pm for our first overnight boondoggle . There were 4 other campers packed there. We noticed a municipal sign “ No RV Overnight Parking, Etc”. We dutifully went into to Customer Service desk to seek permission to park. We were told by the clerks “No problems” but they did mention something about laws. We went back and knocked on a couple of RV’s and woke up the “residents”. It seems that none of them had sought permission and they hadn’t seen the signs. By this time, Fred had walked the parking lot and had seen at least one other similar “No Overnight – municipal law, etc.” sign. One of other campers was all set to use bolt cutters to remove the sign. Instead, we moved our camper into middle of other campers away from sign. “There is safety in a group”, we thought as we had supper and turn in for an uneventful nights sleep.
We decided to travel to another Walmart superstore in Ashland, Wisconsin near Apostles Islands about an hour from Duluth, Minnesota.
When we crossed the border, we experienced a few questions from the agents. After we were cleared to enter the USA, there were tolls to be paid for the bridge. We got to “Pass Holders” lane booth by mistake. Attendant in next booth told us we had to back up. Milly was driving. She had never backed up with camper in tow. Sure enough as people behind us backed away, we started to go off course. Fred jumped out and took over and actually was able to backup the rig and get over to the correct booth.
We were the first camper to arrive at the Walmart, how lonely it felt. There were many, many “No Overnight Camping signs. Having experienced this the prior night, Milly checked with the store attendants, “People park overnight all the time and no one has had problems” was the response. We decided to park in back near truck unloading docks, out of sight. Shortly thereafter, an RV with Australians pulled in. All of us proceeded to shop in the Walmart. We swapped some travel stories before cooking supper of freshly purchased steaks on our new portable grill.
We discovered on internet that all attractions on Apostles Island were not open as yet. We headed for Fargo and picked a campground to make reservations at in Jamestown, North Dakota about 1.5 hours west of Fargo. We experienced heavy winds on our journey to Jamestown as well as some heavy rain at times. The gas mileage was horrendously bad dropping to 9.5 miles per gallon from the 12-14 range we were getting.
When we arrived here in Jamestown, we discovered that one of the weight distribution arms on hitch was almost off due to now missing ridge on hitch that holds the bar in place. We need to replace hitch holder since it’s all one piece of steel. We have locations to go to this morning to see about repairs. We also discovered that water had infiltrated the lower cabinet area above right wheel well. We packed contents into water protective “baggies” and put the problem on our issues list.
I guess we are still in the break in phase as little mishaps are still part of our days, oh the joys of travel!
We are hopefully headed to Theodore Roosevelt Park for several days of relaxed camping, trouble free we hope. We’ll probably be out of touch.