Tea For Two - Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Tea For Two - Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Again, Tom was up before 6am and, as I had asked him, he woke me. I "made the beds" as I crawled out and dressed before I went to the bathrooms. Congratulate me. I got to the bathrooms before Tom was on his way back to the trailer. Yay for me!  :o)

We had breakfast and I made PB&J sandwiches for lunch. I packed them and some carrots for whatever kind of lunch we would have; traveling or stopped.

Tom worked at getting the trailer hooked to the van amidst the banter of the man in the next site who just liked to talk. I finished inside and was able to help a little with the trailer hitching. Off to the bathrooms for the last time here and we actually left the RV Park at 7:55am, 5 minutes earlier than our goal of 8:00am. We really felt good!

We were headed for Tea, SD* just south of Sioux Falls and near the Minnesota border. Tom had estimated that it was a 300 mile trip and it actually was 304.6. Not a bad job.

Although "The Man" said that it would take 5.25 hours driving time. It actually was 4.5 hours. But that's "The Man" for you. We had three stops: one for a rest stop alone, one for a gas stop and one for a rest stop and lunch. Tom thought that we might be able to sit at one of the picnic tables in the rest stop but that didn't work out. The wind was blowing rather hard. The woman in the information booth said that she thought that the wind has been blowing for about 4-5 weeks at a rate of 15 mph. She said that people were getting used to it. I'll be glad when I get away from it. It feels cold to me.

We did, indeed, cross over in to Central Daylight Time. For the purpose of record keeping we kept the car clock and our "body clocks" on Mountain Daylight Time until we arived at the Red Barn RV Park.

When we saw our site I said, "It's only for one night. At least we are close to the bathrooms." Our neighbors have at least one large dog by evidence of the scat left very near where we parked the van. (After we crashed Tom went out and noticed that it had been cleaned up.)

We did "crash." After all that driving Tom was looking a little road weary. It felt good "to be horizontal."

We had dinner soon after we "crashed" and then went out for water and gas. We should soon be finished buying things except for water and gas.

The next things are to get what we need from the internet, especially to check on the geocaches that we want to look for in Minnesota. We will not be spending the night in MN but passing on through to Wisconsin. We want to check to see if the caches have been found lately. We don't want to be looking for something that isn't there any longer as we had done in Montana.

Then to bed, early I hope. "The Man" says there will be more than 6.5 hours driving time tomorrow. And if we get on the road before 8:00am as we did today we could be hitting the work traffic on I-29 before we get to I-90 again and even on I-90. We will be on I-90 all day tomorrow too.

We noticed the difference in the landscape from the Badlands to the eastern border of SD. We were missing the spires and high peaks and now have the rolling mounds. We ave also crossed the Missouri River. However where we crossed the river it was dammed and was a lake.

What surprised us was that we are still over a half mile above sea level. We each expected to be much lower. I was hoping for some warmer weather that the lower altitude would bring us. No such luck. I pulled out another heavier t-shirt for tomorrow. :o(

See you all in Wisconsin tomorrow evening. We are a little over 1100 miles from home. :o)

*When the railroad line survey from Yankton to Sioux Falls ws done, the village of Byron was founded. It was decided the village needed a post office, so an application was submitted. But several other communities were also named Byron, so the postal authorities asked for 10 short names from which one would be chosen. Nine names were chosen, and they could not come up with a tenth. Many residents were German, so the tradition of afternoon tea was important. It was decided to break for tea, then someone suggested adding "Tea" to the list. The postal authorities chose Tea, which was incorporated in 1902. - from the Red Barn RV Park information folder