Travel Blog

On Sunday we had to go home. To Sioux Falls, that is. We had to get a new license plate for the RV because
ours fell off somewhere along the Alaskan highway on the way up to Skagway this year. We tried to get it replaced
through the mail, but no go. Have to get a replacement plate in person. Plus, we had to get registered to vote, and
to do that, we had to stay one night at either the Comfort Inn or Jellystone RV park in order to use either place as
our physical address for registration. We were going to wait until the beet harvest was over, but since it all
depends on the weather, we couldn’t be sure we’d make it down in time. It was time for a road trip anyway. We left
the house in Crookston, packed up the dogs and some sleeping bags, and headed down I-29 all the way to Sioux
Falls.

We left in the afternoon because there was a pre-harvest potluck that we wanted to attend first, and it was only a
5-hour drive. We were making good time and got to see a colorful sunset.


Things got a little hairy midway, though. South of Fargo (yeah, we went through Fargo) it started to rain pretty
hard. We hydroplaned a couple of times, and that was scary because it seemed there was always a big rig
passing us when it happened. It was kind of cool too, though, because I can’t remember the last time I saw
lightning like that. Woo boy! I love a good thunderstorm.

So anyway, we decided to stay at the Jellystone RV Park because that’s where we stayed three years ago when
we had to get our SD driver’s licenses. But this time, since we didn’t have the RV, we got to stay in one of their
cabins. We chose the “rustic” cabin since it was the cheapest.



Nice little place. It had two rooms in it; the main room had a double bed, a TV and a mini-fridge. The other room
had two sets of bunk beds. If you had to, you could sleep 6 in there. Can’t say as you’d want to, but if you had to.
Here’s the RV side of things:



There were some people tent camping right down the hill from our cabin, but I think they floated away in the rain.

They were gone by the time we got up at 7:00 a.m. Poor, soggy folks. But anyway, we had to get up real early to
get everything done and be one road by noon at the very least. Phil had to attend some training for the harvest that
for some reason I wasn’t invited to. That bummed me out a bit because we were going to swing by Laura Ingalls
Wilder’s homestead on the way back, but that had to be scratched. We made it to the County Treasurers office by
8:00 a.m., and there was already a humongous line. We said if we weren’t at the window by 9:00, we’d just forget
it. Who needs a license plate? But the line moved fairly quickly, and we were out of there by nine with a new plate
and registration card. I also talked to the voter registration people, but got scared off when you had to promise
under penalty of law that the physical address you wrote down was where you lived. We decided to go get advice
from our mail forwarder people about getting registered. They helped us a lot and told us not to worry about that
line, we’d be alright. Then they asked us if we knew who we were going to vote for, and if we did, we could vote
that very day! I wanted to do that, but Phil wanted to do more research on the local elections, so we went back to
the same place where we were earlier, handed in our forms, I voted, and Phil got his absentee ballot. Pretty cool.
With everything done, we headed back to Crookston.

So that was our Sioux Falls adventure. Now we don’t need to go back there until 2010 when our driver’s licenses
have to be renewed.

I promised you some pictures of the van/camper. I met Scott and Rosie at the potluck and asked them if I could
have their permission to take pictures and post them here. They’re a cool couple and said sure. While I was taking
the pictures, Scott gave me the thumbs-ip from inside. You can see him in the last picture. So here is the Vamper,
as Scott calls it.

You may be wondering by now what our harvest job entails. I will be getting to that in the next post…