On Friday we left our beautiful campground on the lake to begin heading home. Because we wanted to get an early start, we were up around sunrise. The setting of the lake at this time of day was beautiful. The surface of the lake was smooth as glass, and the reflection of the early morning sun bouncing off the surface of the water was gorgeous. There were a few loons out and about splashing playfully in the early morning hours.

Now you would think with Cranberry Twp. being due east of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, we would start driving east to head home. But that is not how we roll. We began our trek home by first going north and then west. That’s right…north and west.

We first drove north from Grand Rapids to International Falls, Mn. International Falls is on the border with Canada, and is known for often being the coldest spot in the country. We passed about a block from the border crossing where we could see all the flags flying. The thing that struck us the most about International Falls was that the streets were very wide and there was very little traffic - at least at 9 in the morning. That made it very easy to maneuver our truck and camper through the streets. We made a couple of stops (coffee, souvenirs) and then began heading west.

We drove from International Falls to North Dakota. The first half of this drive was right along the border, with the river on our right, and Canada just across on the other side. About half way to North Dakota, the road veered away from the river and the scenery was a little more mundane. This is a very different Minnesota than the one we experienced the last few days: there are less trees and forests and more wide-open fields, grasslands, etc., and also less lakes. This route didn’t go through any big cities, but it did go through a lot of small towns. All of the towns impressed us as being very neat, very clean, very pretty with some of them having hanging baskets of flowers or flowerpots alongside the road to make the drive very colorful. There were also many town squares and parks, and there were many people out and about in these vibrant, bustling towns of the north.

I am told (by Joe) that hockey is really big in Minnesota. It is famous for hockey schools, hockey camps for youth, and there are lots of hockey players that are from this part of Minnesota. Some of the towns had strange names, like Warroad and Baudette. Warroad, with a population of only 1800, has two full size hockey rinks with free ice time to anyone at anytime. There are five NHL players that are from this tiny town of Warroad, and it's nickname is Hockeytown USA. Joe kept commenting about us driving through all these hockey towns, but I have to admit, to an inexperienced eye like mine, I couldn’t tell a hockey town from a non-hockey town. Nevertheless, Joe thought it was neat.

We began heading south when we got to North Dakota (still not east yet, but getting there). We drove south through Grand Forks and Fargo, which are in the very eastern part of the state. Then we continued driving south into South Dakota. When we were about an hour from Sioux Falls, we decided to stop for the night, as by this time, we had driven over 600 miles and were very tired. There were two campgrounds that were convenient to our route, and neither of them took reservations, so we drove into Brookings, South Dakota, extremely tired and hoping to find a home for the night. The first campground we came to didn’t have any open spots. So we drove another 15 minutes or so to the other option. We were fortunate that there were a couple of RV spots open, so we grabbed one. The place was not actually an RV Park, but a trailer park that had a few sites for RVs. It was called Green Acres Trailer Park. The view from the window of our camper differed greatly from the nice view of the lake that we enjoyed the last few nights. Here our view consisted of a gravel road next to a highway, across from a large, noisy, industrial plant of some kind. Oh, how we miss the lakes of Minnesota!

After we got our RV hooked up and got all settled in, we turned on the tv. Choice of stations was extremely limited, but one of them was a station that showed old sitcoms. As it turns out, when we sat down to watch tv, Green Acres was coming on. We decided that it was only appropriate that we watch Green Acres while in Green Acres Trailer Park. After an episode of Green Acres and then Hogan’s Heroes, we called it a night.