6/30 - Red Lake Falls, Day 3

Met with the Catholic church’s archivist today to find where our two missing graves are.  Turns out both are unmarked although the records do show where they are.  One was moved from another cemetery and the 1887 marker might not have survived the move.  The other is a real puzzle though.  Every LaTendresse left in Red Lake Falls after the rest of the family moved to Yakima, WA, is in the same area, all lined up like peas in a pod……except the missing one who is buried some distance away in an unmarked grave.  Why? Family feud?  We may never be able to find out, but it sure is curious. 

The archivist had some interesting stories to tell about the left-overs from Prohibition days.  Her foster son was on the road crew building the main highway through town several decades ago.  They got to an area near the center of the main town block and the concrete they were laying wouldn’t go down right.  One of the crew said he’d find out what the problem was and he started digging.  He hit a solid steel enclosed room under the middle of the street.  It was all lined with wooden panels.  They surmised it was where Kaiser Savard hid the liquor he was running.  Kaiser (his nickname, not real given name) would make runs to Chicago where he had ties to Al Capone and bring the liquor to RLF for distribution.  (Red Lake Falls used to be nicknamed Red Liquor Falls.)  Another colorful character here (long gone, unfortunately) was running from the feds with a car full of liquor.  He hid out for four days in his car underneath a large grain elevator just outside town.  The feds knew he was in the area but could never find him.  Kaiser’s illicit liquor business kept this area going during the tough Prohibition years when all the farms would have gone under had it not been for the booming liquor business.  They were all growing corn for whiskey-making before Prohibition and were able to continue growing it because of Kaiser and the other bootleggers who stayed in operation.  I hope to find out more about this tomorrow when we meet with a couple of the town’s oldest residents.

This afternoon we went to Thief River Falls (20 miles north) to visit the Arctic Cat factory.  The tour was very interesting even though the production line had been shut down for the day.  They’d had a problem with the oven that bakes the powder-coat paint on and didn’t want employees there with nothing to do so sent them home for the day.  While it was disappointing not to see the lines in operation we were able to hear the tour guide much better without all the noise.  Arctic Cat has 1630 employees at that location which is huge for this area.  A lot of their employees drive over from RLF to work.  We were very impressed with the way they build their products and the innovations they’ve come up with.  Wish we could try out the snowmobiles but we don’t want to be here in the winter to do it!

Arctic Cat, Thief River Falls – in business since 1962. Biggest employer in the area.

Wildcat ATV 

Snowmobile with its Fox Shock (Jason works for Fox)

BIG snowmobiles!

6/29 - Red Lake Falls, Day 2

Most of today was spent working on RV repairs.  After hours cutting away the underbelly cover and locating the black tank and gate valve, Jim discovered he didn’t have the tools necessary to do the job even if we got the parts over-nighted to the campground.  I found a shop about 20 miles from our next stop in International Falls, seemingly the only one in far northern Minnesota, and we have an appointment for Thursday afternoon to get the repairs made.

This afternoon we went back to the cemetery to look again for the three people we missed.  We found one of them but the other two aren’t where the church database says they are.  We headed for another small cemetery near town and found it was about 1/3 mile off the highway in the middle of a field with an electric fence and no access. Electric fences often mean cattle and/or bulls inside.  Don’t think we really need to see that one!

Checked out Sportsman’s Park which is at the confluence of the Clearwater and Red Lake Rivers.  It’s a beautiful park and the rivers are gorgeous. 

Red Lake River with Clearwater River coming in from the left.

Clearwater on left, Red Lake River on right.  Great fishing!

Park bench with fish carving.  There are lots of carvings around town.  Someone is generous in sharing his or her talent.

The Red Lake Falls Gazette has been in business for a very long time.  My father’s letters home to his parents after he went to Africa in 1925 were published in installments in this paper for the whole town to read.  He had a degree in geology from the University of Minnesota and was prospecting for diamonds for a big diamond mining and lumber company. All the extended family knew about him, both in Minnesota and in Yakima, Washington, where many of them had moved before 1920. They all thought he must be very rich since he was working in diamonds. 

The sun is bright orange/red this evening due to the extreme haze from all the wildfires in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.  It’s been hazy all day but we didn’t find out the cause until tonight’s news.  I mentioned a few days ago how long daylight is lasting this far north.  It’s not completely dark until after 10:00 pm here.  It really throws us off!  It’s wonderful for the people who live here and have to endure winters with little daylight and temperatures as low as 60 below.  They make use of every bit of daylight they can in the summer.

6/28 - Red Lake Falls, Day 1

It’s been a beautiful day with great weather.  Jim dealt with the water heater……the new element didn’t work because the problem was in the switch which he found and fixed….then it blew the breaker because we have only 30 amp power here and it must have come on at the same time as the air conditioning.  Back to heating by propane and no more problem.

What we did today will mainly be of interest to family but you never know.  We spent the morning at St. Joseph’s Catholic Cemetery where a lot of family members are buried.  We found all but three people I was looking for plus a couple I had no idea were there, so it was very successful.  I was amazed we did so well because it’s a really disorganized cemetery with graves facing both east and west, old flat stones right up against big vertical ones, crooked rows, family names in more than one group…..everything higgledy piggledy.  Very easy to miss things.  Couldn’t figure out what plan, if any, they had when they started burying people there so didn’t know where to look for the oldest graves.  We never could find my great-great-grandmother’s marker from 1887 which, according to findagrave.com, is there.  We found the LaTendresse plot with my great-grandparents and the rest of the LaTendresses who didn’t move to Washington State.  Their gravestones have Americanized names……Francis and Virginia rather than their given names of Francois and Virginie.  They spoke French at home (my father didn’t learn English until he went to school) but Virginie never learned to speak English at all so it’s odd her name would have been anglicized. 

We heard a funny story yesterday from our campground’s owners who are very knowledgeable about the town.  Pierre Bottineau was the founder of the town and, naturally, a very important person in Red Lake Falls history.  He was the one who led a group of French families from the Twin Cities area to Red Lake Falls in 1876, my great-great-grandparents among them (Elie and Sophie Cyr, not the LaTendresse side which came from Quebec).  Bottineau, ND, was named after Pierre.  The Catholic priest here was afraid the town of Bottineau was going to claim Pierre’s body from it’s grave in a non-Catholic cemetery west of town and have it reburied in ND.  So one night the priest and a couple of other men dug him up and moved him to St. Joseph’s Cemetery where, being consecrated ground, it could not be disturbed.  It worked because he’s still here.  

One of two hills in town, undoubtedly here because of the river.  My father skied on barrel staves when he was a kid so this was probably the hill.  All those cars in the mid-distance belong to the people who come from all over to spend a day tubing on the river.  They come regularly from as far as Fargo, ND (110 miles), Grand Forks, ND (40 miles), and Winnepeg, Manitoba (160 miles).  The Canadians are crazy wild, according to our hosts…..much rowdier than the Americans who come here.  Fortunately for us, the Canadian national holiday on July 1^st falls in the middle of the week so there aren’t that many of them here.  And I always thought Canadians were calm and peaceful.  Apparently not so.

A dangerous load on this truck going through town from the campground.  Hope they didn’t have to go very far.  If those floats came loose they could cover the windshield of the vehicle behind them.

According to a very old map of Red Lake Falls, this is where my great-grandfather’s farm was located over 100 years ago.  Now there’s nothing but fields planted with crops as far as the eye can see.  And it is FLAT.  Kansas couldn’t be any flatter than this.

The Red Lake County court house in Red Lake Falls with the date 1910 on the front.  It was built when my father was 12 years old so there is still something here he would recognize today.  It’s a beautiful and impressive building. 

I said yesterday the river would be too cold for us to consider tubing in it.  Turns out it’s not cold at all.  It’s about 75 degrees today.  This is because it’s coming out of Lower Red Lake with a maximum depth of only 84 feet so the water isn’t all that cold, plus it’s a shallow river so warms up even more as it flows towards Red Lake Falls.  There aren’t any falls here either.  The name comes from the fact that the elevation drops gradually from Lower Red Lake to here which causes the river to fall 200 to 300 feet over that distance.  Doesn’t make any sense to me to have “falls” in the name of the town when there aren’t any but maybe it made sense to those who named it.  Or maybe they thought they’d make people wonder about it as long as the town lasted. 

6/27 - Summit, SD, to Red Lake Falls, Minnesota

RV’ing is not the footloose and fancy-free lifestyle envisioned by the uninitiated.  What it often amounts to is drive a day….fix something….drive a couple more days….fix something.  We are now six days into the trip with three repairs and a minor but irritating maintenance issue (restringing one particular window shade for the umpteenth time). 

The day started off on the wrong foot when the cable to the black tank gate valve broke.  This means the black tank can’t be closed off and anything put in it will pile up against the drainpipe cover. Not a good thing when you open it and everything comes out. (Been there, done that, on a much smaller scale. Makes a hilarious story later but not fun at the time it’s happening.)  The valve is in a very difficult-to-access place so will be a royal pain to fix….if Jim can even figure out how to get to the valve.  We are in almost as remote a place here in northern Minnesota as we were in a lot of the southwest a few months ago, so there aren’t many RV service places.  The other repairs are to the electric element in the water heater (new element being sent here by Amazon) and the generator exhaust pipe coming loose and discovering all its supports are nearly rotted through.  We wouldn’t have found that out until it let loose on the highway and tore the whole thing off if Jim hadn’t leaned on it and broke one of the connectors.  Although he despises having to constantly fix things, if he weren’t so good at it we would have had to give up on RV’ing a long time ago.  In case anyone hasn’t heard this already, the nickname of our fifth wheel is “Nightmare.”  It is once again living up to it.

Now, getting past the breaking gate valve, the drive was good.  Right around the SD/ND line the terrain changed from hilly to flat as a pancake.  I’ll have to check out what the glaciers did around here, but it looks like they must have scoured the hills away.  Minnesota is totally flat with the only thing breaking the view is lines and clumps of trees.  The only houses we saw were in the tiny little villages along the way once we got off the interstate after Fargo, ND.  I’m sure there were farm houses within sight along the highway but they were blocked from view by groves of trees which are probably necessary to protect them from the wind.  A lot of the trees were leaning to the east so it’s obvious which way the wind blows. 

FLAT farmland and the usual afternoon thunderstorms.

In case anyone is interested in agriculture (we are), the main crops around here are spring wheat, sugar beets, soybeans, alfalfa, and corn plus a few other things in lesser amounts.  This collection of storage tanks is right outside Red Lake Falls.  Judging by the number of different tanks they must be storing a variety of crops. This is the biggest tank collection we’ve seen so far.

If anyone is wondering why we’re in such an out-of-the-way place, my father was born here (in 1898) and I have been wanting to see it for years.  It’s a small town (1427 population on their sign) with nothing much to keep it going except farming after the lumber industry collapsed in the early 1900’s and the railroads pulled out.  It’s a pretty place, very clean and neat (I’ll get pictures of it tomorrow), but I can certainly imagine it being the kind of low-key place a young man with lots of ambition and no interest in farming would want to get away from.  Unless you want to go into farming or something that supports farmers (like the general store my great-uncle owned) there wouldn’t be much to do here.  My grandfather and his brother had a saloon and liquor distributorship here for years (something that always fills a need) until prohibition put them out of business in 1919. I have good reason to believe they continued their business as bootleggers because they lived comfortably but were never known to work another day in their lives which lasted another three+ decades.  

Our campground is a nice field with hook-ups right on the Red Lake River.  The main business of this place is tubing on the river so there are lots of wild and noisy young people with tubes and coolers, just like we used to be about 30 years ago.  It looks like great fun but our days of tubing are long gone…..unless the water temperature is about 80 degrees.  Don’t think river water this far north would be anywhere near that.  We’ve been told they’ll all be gone tomorrow and we’ll have the place to ourselves during the week.

The campground is owned by an extremely nice family.  The sons (30-ish) are huge Tarheel fans and even drove all the way down to Chapel Hill to go to a game (about 1500 miles).  Now that’s being a fanatic fan!  Ryan, the son who checked us in, offered every kind of help possible from finding a repair service on Monday to trying to fix our broken gate valve himself tomorrow.  His brother Jason had even written on our reservation that we were Tarheels and were here to check out where my father was born.

The Red Lake River from the campground.  One of my great-grandfathers was a log driver on this river and the nearby Clearwater River in the late 1800’s.  It was a very dangerous occupation.  If the log driver slipped into the river he could easily be crushed or drowned.

We don’t have a picture of Ben Cyr (my great-grandfather) running logs but here’s a picture of his cousin Fred doing the same thing.  It took a nimble-footed man to do this.  Ben was so nimble-footed he danced a jig on a tabletop on his 92^nd birthday.  The lumber industry flourished in northern Minnesota for several decades until they’d cut everything in sight and had to move to Washington State to continue doing the same thing. 

We’re under a tornado watch here.  I’ll get this off quick while we’ve still got a hotspot connection (no wifi here). There’s a tornado on the ground just to the west of us near Grand Forks, ND, so we’ll be keep a close watch on the weather.  An RV is no place to be in a tornado.  Jumping in the river would be better.  :-D  

6/26 - Omaha to Summit, SD

A good 335 mile drive up I-29 from Omaha to Summit, SD……as peaceful as any interstate driving we’ve ever done.  The countryside is beautiful all the way up I-29 from Kansas City.  Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota are full of gorgeous green farmland as far as the eye can see.  At some point closer to Nebraska we left the non-stop corn fields behind and changed to luscious looking grassland.  It almost made us hungry and we aren’t even cows.  We saw a lot more cows today, too.  They were all out in the fields…..no feed lots here.  Happy cows.

Grain storage facility along I-29 in South Dakota.  

Storm clouds over I-29.  The rain we went through wasn’t heavy and it didn’t last long. The clouds were beautiful to watch.  To the right and left were puffy white clouds and blue sky with this mass of gray storm in between.  This is Big Sky country where you can see almost forever.

One of the beautiful farms along I-29. 

I’ve always pictured South Dakota as being really flat but it isn’t.  It's flatter in the middle but gets hilly again in the west.  If it weren’t for the tough winters this state would have a much bigger population. 

A pedestrian in the gas station parking lot.  His friends had flown off by the time I got the camera. 

WHAT ARE GULLS DOING IN SOUTH DAKOTA???  Did we take a wrong turn somewhere?  We’ve always found it odd that shore birds show up in the WNC mountains, but this is the center of the continent!  Gulls are opportunistic scavengers but this is really surprising. It would make sense if this were nearer the Great Lakes, but they are also a long way off.

6/25 - Omaha, Day 2

This was a nice relaxing day.  Decided to skip the art museum and not go back into the downtown Omaha traffic.  Instead we went to Fontenelle Forest, a conservation preserve which is in Bellevue about five miles up the river between our campground and Omaha. It’s a National Natural Landmark, founded in 1913, and one of the largest private nature centers in the country.  Fontenelle Forest, along with Neale Woods in Omaha, encompass nearly 2,000 acres of forest, prairie and wetlands along the Missouri River.  Fortunately it was much cooler and less humid today which made for a very pleasant outing. 

It’s a beautiful place and reminded us very much of home.  The area along the river is hilly plus most of the plants we saw today are found in WNC.  The place is a premier spot for birdwatchers in the Omaha area with over 80 species known to nest in Fontenelle and Neale Woods.  We were there at a bad time of day for birdwatching (mid-afternoon) but still managed to find three species we’ve never seen before.  Such a difference from our southwest trip earlier this spring during which we saw hardly any birds at all.

Fontenelle Forest has free motorized scooters for handicapped visitors’ use.  This was a huge benefit for Jim as his feet have been exceptionally bad the past few days.  It was a really enjoyable way for him to do the one mile boardwalk trail.

The Constitution Tree, a bur oak which began its life in 1731.  It was 56 years old when the constitution was signed and 136 years old when Nebraska became a state in 1867. That was on the information plaque so I didn’t have to look it up!  :-D

Whimsical art in the forest.  The little character in front has captured a monster.  They’re made out of old tires, hose, tape and other oddments.  Very clever use of things that would otherwise go to a landfill.

Fontenelle Forest also runs a raptor recovery program.  They have many raptors in the program but most are not on site.  I couldn’t get pictures of the four who were there because there wasn’t enough light so I borrowed one from their website.  The great horned owl was gorgeous and looked very ferocious.  Looks are deceiving because it turns out he’s a great foster parent to orphaned chicks and has helped raise many of them.  He came into the program with severe head injuries and loss of balance.  His injuries healed and he recovered his balance but he lost his “owl-self-awareness” so could not be released back into the wild.

Halsey, the great horned owl foster parent.

A comment on last night’s post about the lack of plane traffic at Offutt AFB.  We’ve seen eight planes coming in since I wrote that and we couldn’t hear a single one.  They aren’t stealth bombers but they sure are quiet.  If we hadn’t been outside and turned towards them we would never have known they were there.  Sneaky.

6/24 - Omaha, Day 1

Another hot, humid day (90 degrees) with hours of fierce thunderstorms, but we got out in between them.

We went to Offutt AFB this morning to the commissary and Base Exchange.  This base was the headquarters of SAC (Strategic Air Command) for 40 years and is now the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM).  It is also home to the Air Force Weather Agency and the 55^th Wing, the largest wing of the Air Combat Command.  It doesn’t appear to be a big installation compared to the others we’ve been on but looks can be deceiving.  Our campground is about half a mile from the runways but we’ve yet to hear a plane taking off or landing.  We had an unpleasant dose of planes going in and out at the Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach a few years ago so we’re very happy to find this place so quiet.

This afternoon we went to Camping World across the river from Omaha in Council Bluffs, IA, to look for a water heater element which they didn’t have in stock.  (Our water heater is malfunctioning again, but it’s only the electric side.  It still heats by propane.)  The Council Bluffs/Omaha riverfronts are industrial and not attractive, but that’s not unusual for city riverfronts. 

We then went over the bridge to Omaha to the National Park Service’s Lewis and Clark Historic Trail Headquarters on the river (low building in the center of the picture below).  It’s a small visitor center but has interesting exhibits and lots of information about National Park Service parks and monuments within reach of the L&C trail that stretches from Illinois to Oregon.  Next to it is the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge linking Omaha with Council Bluffs.  There are people who think it was a waste of taxpayer money, but it’s the only way pedestrians and cyclists can cross the river to make use of the large network of paved trails on both sides.  It’s the first ever pedestrian bridge to connect two states.  We never got in position to take a good picture so I’m including one from Omaha.net’s website.  It would be neat to see it lit up at night but we’re not going to drive a 30-mile round trip to see it.

Taken from the I-80 bridge.  Lewis and Clark visitor center in middle, Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge looking like a line across the middle of the picture.

This one is from the Omaha.net website, looking across to the Iowa side. 

The 65-year old Bellevue Toll Bridge between Bellevue (just south of Omaha) and Iowa.  There aren’t many bridges between Nebraska and Iowa.  This one has been supplanted by a new bridge which opened in October 2014 at the south end of  Bellevue (the one we came over to get to our campground).  This old bridge needs $1,000,000 in renovations which it won’t get if the bond issue isn’t passed.  For now it’s charging $1 per car and $2 for a dually.  The bridge is still needed but it’s going to be difficult to fund repairs and maintenance.  We’re so glad the new bridge was finished before we got here.

Corn fields on the Iowa side of the toll bridge.  Most of the cornfields we’ve seen are uniform and healthy in appearance with thick, high stalks but not this one.  The uneven growth and yellowing plants are suffering from an over-abundance of rain which is ponding in depressions and swales. A lot of this field will either die or fail to produce good ears.  With all the rain the mid-west has had recently it’s amazing so many fields still look healthy. 

Healthy corn probably isn’t necessary when it’s being used for ethanol.  There’s a 110-million gallon per year ethanol plant just south of Council Bluffs which is using over 44.6 million bushels of locally grown corn annually.   

Omaha skyline from the Iowa side of the river.  I couldn’t get a decent picture from where we were today so I borrowed one from TripAdvisor.  It’s a beautiful city.  I was surprised to find out it has nearly 900,000 people in its eight-county metropolitan area.  It has an illustrious history…..its stockyards were once the world’s largest…..and is today home to a number of Fortune 500 and 1000 companies, including Warren Buffett’s Berkshire-Hathaway. 

We’re having a time adjusting to the change in daylight here.  We’re so much farther north it’s staying light till almost 9:30.  It will really be weird when we get to Red Lake Falls on Saturday and sunset is 9:30 (sunrise at 5:30). 

6/21 to 6/23 - From Home to Omaha

Nearly 1100 miles behind us.  It’s been a nicely uneventful three days of driving, the first two very hot and humid but now, in Omaha, pleasantly cool.  We had a noisy thunderstorm in the middle of last night (in Danville, MO) but it was nothing on the scale of the storms that hit Illinois.  We’ve been very lucky in all our traveling to miss all the bad stuff.

The only thing of note from yesterday is that we crossed four huge rivers…..Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi and Missouri…..all out of their banks from the recent storms.  Not much out, but there’s no room to spare.  The campground we stayed at in Memphis last fall…..right on the Mississippi…..will probably be under water very soon.  They said they usually have about three weeks’ notice before floods hit them so there’s plenty of time to move everyone out.

Tennessee River from I-24 near Paducah, KY            

Ohio River from I-24 near Paducah, KY

  

Mississippi River from I-270 at St Louis                  

      

Missouri River from I-270 at St Louis

Sorry for the lack of variety but they all look much the same.  There will be a test when we get home…….identify all the rivers we’ve crossed.  :-D  

These are really massive rivers.  It’s hard to wrap my head around how much water is constantly moving through them.  Most of the towns and cities we’ve been to were there because of either rivers or railroads.  When we come across a place that has neither my first thought is “why is this here?”  Like with Willcox, AZ, it is often still related to railroads…..one that was there (and still is) but is no longer important because transportation switched to trucking.  Now I-10 runs by the town but it’s no longer needed so most of it is falling apart.

The most unnerving section of the drive so far was going through Kansas City today.  I had several alternate routes planned in case of traffic problems but none were the route the GPS wanted to take. I still haven’t figured out how to make it go where I want instead of where IT wants so I use my smartphone and paper maps knowing I can’t count on Eloise (the GPS) to cooperate.  That was all a good thing because Eloise’s route (I-435) was closed going north.  We headed for the option I wanted so we could swing through a corner of Kansas and mark it off our list of states.  I knew exactly where we were supposed to go but when we got there (see picture with all the route signs) the left turn onto I-670 was actually two lanes over and came up so quickly we couldn’t get far enough over.  You don’t shove a 53-foot truck and trailer into the next lane in a hurry, at least not if you want to come out unscathed.  If I’d been able to program Eloise correctly (and I hadn’t been taking a picture at just the wrong moment) I would have known about the sudden turn, but as it was we just had to keep going.  We ended up on I-35 south, going the opposite direction from where we needed to go.  KC is so full of interstates, though, it wasn’t long before we came across one we could use to get back where we belonged.  We probably didn’t go more than 6 miles out of our way and it certainly was less stressful than trying to double back.  What an amazing mess of roads.

Kansas City, Missouri

KC's mass of interstates

One of the beautiful farms we passed between St. Joseph, MO, and the Iowa border.  

Northwestern Missouri is gorgeous…..rolling green fields of corn, hilly on the east side of I-29

and flatter on the west.  We’ve never seen so much corn in our lives as in the past three days.  Amazingly few animals (cows, sheep, horses) but probably enough corn to feed every cow in the country.  We’re guessing most of it goes into ethanol.  What a waste of good food.  

Fascinating storm clouds over northwestern Missouri which lowered this afternoon’s temperatures.  The clouds ended right before we got to Omaha without raining on us much.  It was really a great drive (once KC was behind us) as I-29 had very little traffic.

We’re in a very nice little military campground owned by Offutt AFB.  It has a lovely 117 acre lake stocked with fish, although the fishermen we talked to weren’t having any luck.  It’s away from the populated areas and very quiet.  Tomorrow we’ll check out the base commissary and do some sightseeing.  We’re happy to have two days to relax and not have to drive all day.  Lovie and the cats second that.