Van Adventures

Aug 21-26 We left the Twin Cities area to make our way to our next big destination, Teddy Roosevelt National Park – all the way across North Dakota.   We did a quick overnight in Staples, MN, then on to Bismarck, ND.    Most of the area is in what is known as the Iron Belt.   The result is a lot of iron in the ground and the water.   Untreated, it comes out of the ground orange and smells like rust.   Even filtered and treated, the picture shows what passes as potable water here at the campground.   It was awful!   We couldn’t even shower in it!   The campground itself was lovely and we were treated to a beautiful sunset. There were 4 species of woodpeckers showing up on our Merlin app, including a noisy piliated. We saw him, but the downy, hairy and red-bellied chose to hide. On our way to Bismarck, ND we traveled through Detroit Lakes, MN. Detroit Lakes hosts 5 of the Dambo trolls, so we decided to spend our morning troll hunting! Each of...

 Aug 15-20 This week we continued our Great Lakes Discovery tour.   We made our way across the rest of upper Michigan and spent the night in Ironwood, on the border of Wisconsin.   The next day we headed west across Wisconsin, making a stop in Ashland to do laundry.   While at Bay Wash, we had a great conversation with a woman who works with the Water Protectors.   She told us about the work being done up there, not only for water protection, but also immigrant rights education and access to social services.   As we parted, we encouraged each other to keep up the good work.   We started to drive away and she came running out of the laundromat to hand us a wet shirt that she wanted us to have…it said Protect the Great Lakes. We rolled into Duluth in the early afternoon to meet our friend, Nenette, whom we met on our recent Morrocco trip.   We paid a visit to the Duluth Trading Post and grabbed a beer at a local brewery before meeting Nenette for ...