July 7-11 - visit Mary Laeger-Hegimeister in Minnesota

Left PA July 7 after Jillian’s HS graduation party. Stayed at Deer Ridge Campground in Richmond IN. Nice campground. Would stay here again. 

July 8 we made it to Davenport, IA. Stayed in Scott County campground. Nice place but registration was a hassle. 

July 9 we made it to visit Mary Laeger-Hegimeister. Bill and I were both colleagues of hers when she lived in PA. We stayed in a really nice campground about 15 minutes from her place - Town and Country RV Park in Savage MN. 

To celebrate my birthday, we visited Mary’s son’s business called Tacocat. That was fun to see Dan and have some tasty food. Next we went to the Minnesota Institute of Art to see the Native American Women’s art. We had a docent explain a lot of the exhibits. Quite interesting and informative. 

Thursday Bill went to visit Fort Snelling and Lenny and I went to hike in the Wildlife Refuge. This was a sculpture there. There has been so much rain that fields and trails are flooded. 

As we drove across Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, we noticed the fields of corn weren’t very high. They couldn’t get in to plant as early as usual. As we came into Minnesota, corn was much taller. 

Friday, July 12 we left for Fargo. Stayed in Buffalo River State Park. If you’ve heard about the mosquitoes in Minnesota, they were correct. They are all over. We did hike for about 3 miles and got plenty of bites. Nice hike other than that. 

This is a picture of the prairies of Minnesota. I didn’t realize how flat it was here. 

As I was driving to the FargoDome, we saw field of sugar beets. We don’t see many of these back home. 

March 26 lots of hiking and Bill’s birthday

Decided to stay another night at Maumelle Park because we found spring and maybe summer!  

Lots of hiking around here. We decided we wanted to hike the Riverwalk so Bill put that in the phone’s GPS. Thirty minutes later and along a very windy road we came to a little town of Bigalow. It’s the same size as Fillmore ... one stop shopping at the General Store. And thank heavens they had gas because the light was on in the truck. Now we did have to pay inside but we didn’t care. Asked them if we were close to the Riverwalk. After they stopped laughing, they said we were about 50 minutes away in the direction we came. When we finally found the Riverwalk, we were only 7 miles from our campground. I guess the GPS wanted us to see more of Arkansas!  Reminded me of the Fillmore Store where I grew up. 

Beautiful, peaceful 4 mile walk.  

I was carrying Reuben in his backpack so I had 10 extra pounds on!  

The weather really warmed up and there was SUN. I’m glad I still knew what it was. Decided to go back to the campground and change into summer clothes and then head off to Pinnacle Mountain. Of all the trails available to us, “we” decided to do the 3.5 mile loop around the mountain. How tough could that be?  Well, it probably wouldn’t have been bad except we had already walked 4 miles earlier. This hike was over a lot of boulders so 2.5 hours later, we made it back to the truck. 

Since it was Bill’s birthday we had to do something to celebrate so Bill built our first campfire of this trip and my first s’mores. 

Enjoyable day and evening but I’m ready for bed.