As discussed last post, I needed to find a nice place to stash Rosemarie, the cat, and our rig while I flew to Charleston to retrieve The Big Kahuna.  I planned for up to a week long ordeal.  As we have mentioned previously, we find that county parks seem to offer the best value and experience, at least for the types of natural settings we prefer.  Research on All Stays revealed a slew of such options in and around the Twin Cities.  Based on reviews, specific location, and availability, we secured a week at Lebanon Hills Regional Park.  “Regional” being another term for “County” in this area, apparently.

It wasn’t cheap, just over $33 a night with no weekly discount, but it included full hook ups, a clean bath/shower facility, nice walking trails, a laundry room with oversized, industrial type machines, a reasonable number of over the air TV channels, and best of all since I wouldn’t be around to entertain Rosemarie, fully working wifi.  Our site was of a decent size,  but a number of others in the park were rather crowded in with their neighbors.

We had a small bit of drama associated with Serenity’s door steps: they wouldn’t go down. Despite a healthy amount of yelling at them, banging on them, and repeated attempts to reset the system by turning the rig on and off with the step switch in different positions, they resolutely refused to extend.  Since our spot was particularly unlevel, the front jacks were at full extension in order to get some semblance of an even floor.  This meant that the front tires were completely off the ground leaving a nearly three foot drop out of our front door!  I finally managed to clear whatever “fat electron” was jamming up the system by disconnecting the house batteries using an isolation switch, the stairs immediately dropping after I reconnected.  Crisis avoided.

The day before I flew to Charleston we hit the Hy-Vee to resupply.  One of the mildly interesting things about travelling all over the country is experiencing the various regional grocery chains.  Hy-Vee gets two thumbs up from us.  And since we will not be passing through Chicago this trip, I researched and selected a consolation prize here in Minneapolis for lunch: traditional Chicago style pizza from The Italian Pie Shoppe.  Fantastic, and I look forward to comparing it to The Windy’s City’s offerings some time in the future.

I flew out the next day, leaving Rosemarie five days to binge watch all the Netflix she could.  This was unfortunate.  We have an agreement that we don’t watch our “together” shows independently.  That’s cheating.  We also happen to have a lengthy list of shows that we have not yet fit into our schedule, but plan to watch together some time down the road.  During my absence Rosemarie “conveniently” pretended not to know about the future list and watched, I kid you not, nearly five seasons of our future “together” shows.  Three seasons of Peaky Blinders, and one each of Stranger Things and Turn.  This shall not stand.

Rosemarie doing a Netflix victory dance in the corn pit.

I returned a day earlier than planned, probably just in time to prevent her from watching another season of Turn.  This also allowed us to spend part of the weekend at the Minneapolis Harvest Festival.  Live music (classic rock,) local fair type food (fried cheese curds!) a cornfield maze, a corn pit, a petting zoo, etc etc.  We enjoyed the day, and got to hold a baby kangaroo.  Named Joey, apparently.

Corn maze Jack.

The next day I came down with some sort of stomach virus that incapacitated me for about 48 hours.   This necessitated an extension of our stay, pushing us to ten days total, before we could continue south towards Iowa.  Rosemarie caught what we assume is the same bug upon arrival there, probably some sort of karmic response to her netflix cheating.  Ah well, we have truly made our turn back towards Florida, with our next stop another 200 miles southward.