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 92nd
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
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