Our New Summer Home

We finally made it to our destination for the summer  -- the US Forest Service campground on Whiteface Reservoir up north of Duluth, MN.  They had gotten 4 inches of snow two days before our arrival.  Luckily it was warm enough that it quickly melted because when we arrived everything was pretty much bare ground and fairly dry.  The campground has about 80 camp sites and we will be taking care of two loops of the four.  Mowing, cleaning the pit toilets and cleaning up campsites and working in the tiny store.   We plan to be fishing on our days off -- can't wait to catch some walleyes.

The campground has all paved roads and all paved sites.  We have electricity at our site and a hose to fill our water tank from the outside spigot.  We also have a machine and hose to help empty our sewer tank into the cleanout of the pit toilet so its almost like we have full hookups.  We have a golf cart to get around the campground that we keep at our site.  Our site has a lakeview -- when no one is camped in the site across from us.  Right now the lake is still frozen over and the water level is low.  Minnesota Power controls the water level so hopefully they will raise the level soon.  We are enjoying the peace and quiet before the campground opens for business -- May first. 

Dodge City, KS Boot Hill

We are finally back on the road heading north to Minnesota.  After spending so much time in Tucumcari, NM I was afraid we would be stuck there.  We left there and our next stop was Dodge City, KS.  We went to the Boot Hill Museum.  They have done a good job of preserving the past cowboy era when Dodge City was the heart of the wild west.  The cemetery itself has some of the real old markers but most are recreations.  There is a little building with great artifacts from the plains indians, buffalo hunters and cowboys.   The floor even shook when they showed a video of a buffalo hunt and you got a sense of what it was like on the prairie with thousands of buffalo stampeding.  There was a tv from the early 50's showing an episode of Gunsmoke.

The picture of the bar is the Long Branch Saloon which was made famous on the Gunsmoke tv show.  You could even belly up to the bar and have a drink.  They had a whole row of old town buildings.  Everything from the bar to dry goods store, restaurant, blacksmith shop, newspaper, jail cell and even a boot store. 

It is well worth the money to visit this place and I think you could go more than once and see things you missed the first time.   

On to Nebraska tomorrow.

Mesalands Dinosaur Museum

We are still parked in Tucumcari, New Mexico on the famous Route 66.  The weather up north is frightful and the warmth down here is delightful so here we stay, here we stay.  We plan on staying here another week so we are seeing all the sites within fifty miles of the RV park.  We went to the local dinosaur museum that is associated with the community college and it was pretty nice.  For some reason they have a bronzing shop as part of the museum so they love to bronze dinosaur bones. 
 We are meeting lots of people in the same boat we are in -- trying to get north but the weather isn't cooperating.  We need to spend two days in South Dakota to get new drivers licenses but they got hit really hard by the blizzard and they might get more snow this coming week sometime so it will be awhile before we can go there.  Our job in northern Minnesota was supposed to start this month but the manager has pushed the start date way back so we are not rushing anywhere.

Chiricahua National Monument

We left Yuma and started heading east.  We kept looking at the weather in the north and decided to slow down and stay awhile longer in the south.  We stayed in a little town called Willcox, Az.   Outside of town about 30 some miles is the Chiricahua National Monument.  We took several drives through it and really enjoyed the views.  There is only one road and you follow it up to the top and  the vistas are terrific with all the pillars of stone caused by wind and erosion. 

Willcox is a cute little town and has several wineries and the Rex Allen cowboy museum.   We found a nice little campground that was inexpensive and decided to enjoy the area for a few days.  We got to meet up with two couples that we worked with that were traveling through the area at the same time.  One couple were on their way to Tuscon.  The other couple were on their way to their summer job and were going to stop at the Grand Canyon.  They happened to be coming through Willcox when we were so we got to have a nice reunion.

We are now in New Mexico and still watching the terrible weather in the north.  We will slowly make our way north but will be extending our stay here and there as the weather dictates.

Saying goodbye to summer

We are starting our journey north tomorrow.  Its been in the 90's here the last few days but very comfortable at night.  It's hard to leave here knowing that we are heading into a very cold spring.  We are watching the weather in the states we have to drive through and there is cold and snow on our route.  We wish we could stay south for a while longer but our summer job is waiting for us.   Once we get to Minnesota we will be checking in with the manager for updates on campground conditions.  We are hoping for 50's at least during the day and 30's at night.  Any colder than that and we will be waiting to move any farther north. 

We just got our truck back from having some major work done.  It is running good and already getting better mileage. We will be putting it to the test towing our "train" tomorrow.  Since we are nervous about testing it we are only driving about 100 miles east the first day.  It will be climbing into the 90's so we don't want to push too hard.  This time next week we expect to be somewhere in Nebraska if it isn't snowing.