Retired Nomads: County Line Camp Grounds

July 12

We left Minnesota behind and are now in South Dakota. It was a nice drive and we saw a few interesting things along the way. One was a helicopter with something on a line hanging from it and trying to get it to a guy on a cherry picker fixing a power line. Then, I had my camera out to get the photo of the state border sign (there wasn’t one) when we saw another helicopter with a man outside of it on a platform working on a power line. Yikes! That job can’t pay enough….

don't know what these are

We stopped in Sioux Falls, South Dakota for diesel. It’s Greg’s first time in South Dakota, but not mine.

Many years ago, growing up in Iowa, there were 5 of us girls and 5 boys that hung out together (final year of Jr. High timeframe). One of our girlfriends moved to Sioux Falls and we missed her as did her boyfriend and we made plans to visit her. Two of us got permission from our parents to make the trip across the border with her boyfriend. (he was a bit older) We accidently made a wrong turn on a one- way street and literally only went half a block before we found a parking lot to turn around in when the police stopped us. Due to our age we were taken back to the police station. They called our parents and they told them we had permission to visit a friend, but they wouldn’t let us go home on our own and made our parents drive to Sioux Falls to pick us up causing us to stay 1 night in the jail there that was over-flowing with juveniles. In fact, they were so full they put us in a cell with an adult female who was in for stealing a car and was harmless…unlike the sounds we heard coming from the juvenile side. Our parents were not mad at us, but mad at the police. It was interesting that they were looking for drugs (which we had none) and they ripped open the seams of my winter coat (ruining it) and tore apart some makeup that they were sure were hiding drugs. They ripped out linings of purses etc. Oddly, if they had looked in the trunk of the car they impounded, they would have found beer in the trunk. But, they didn’t. That’s my only “run in with the law” in my life.

After our fuel stop we seemed to be out in the middle of nowhere (again) past corn and soybean fields & cows when we found the sign to the town where the RV park is. Then we drove down it’s small main street and just on the edge of town was the RV Park. It’s small, but will suffice for our 3 nites here. Sights aren’t terribly level, but it works. At least the water is better than the last park. There it smelled metallic when it didn’t smell like sewer water. Yum! It was well water for sure and I put off washing clothes until we got here in hopes of better water. It is.

After we got set up we laughed about walking around the park for our evening walk (there are like 2 or 3 rows here) So I said let’s walk the town. (not that it was much bigger) Most of the stores on main street were defunct. We walked around a couple of the streets and then walked past the RV Park to just outside of the town. We walked about all the area we could find and headed home.