August 6

We struggled across another 500 miles of Hwy 2 yesterday, finishing off Montana and nearly all of North Dakota. We were both very tired from the lousy sleep at Glasgow due to the railway noise, and I had some kind of intestinal ailment. Maybe it was from the twelve different samples of beer the night before, including pickle and jalapeño flavored. We stopped multiple times, totaling several hours along the way, to try to take a nap, and for me to try to clear my dump tank. We were unsuccessful on both counts. We finally arrived, as it was getting dark, at an RV park near Grand Forks around 9:00: much later than we'd planned. As we approached the RV Park, up ahead we see flashing red lights on our road, then see those lights swinging down  on crossarms to block the road. Sure as shit, here comes a huge BNSF train, going between us and our campground. As we sat there waiting for the three engines and about one hundred cars to pass, we weren't sure if we should laugh or cry. Then as we crossed the tracks and turned onto the campground road, we see the Interstate up ahead, paralleling us. We were about to spend the  night in an RV park wedged between an active train line and I-29. And then it started to rain. We chose laughter. The beauty of rain is, it can drown out the noise of trains and road noise. It's easy to sleep under the pleasant drone of a hard rain on a metal rooftop.  Unfortunately, in the middle of the night, it also caused our outlets to go dead, and that meant no CPAP and no portable fan. We left the generators in the truck, uncharged, because we didn't need them with the 30 Amp service we paid for from the RV park. Since I'm the one who hooks up the electric, I left Peach warm and cozy in the bed as I ventured out in the rain; a hero in the darkness (in my own mind.) I figured a breaker had tripped on the electrical service post, or perhaps on our external surge protector we plugged into it, but the power light was still on for both. That's when I realized we had a GFI (ground fault interrupt on the outlets, in case some water gets into them. I had plugged an extension cord from the camper's outside outlet, and ran the cord into the truck to power that darn freezer. The cord's male plug apparently got wet and tripped the GFI inside. I disconnected the cord, came back inside the camper, and reset the GFI. So went our last night in an RV park on this trip. We're on our way to Hayward to spend our last night with our friends, Dick and Peggy Perry, and then meet our daughter for lunch tomorrow on our way home. We met the Perry's while camping in Texas several years ago, they in their camper, we in our tent. They were inspirational (along with Peach's brother and sister) in our decision to buy a camper.  They are heading to Alaska next year, and we'll be passing on our maps, guidebooks, and recommendationsto them. They are much more experienced at trailer camping  than we are, so they probably will avoid many of our  blunders along the way. Hopefully, they won't avoid ALL blunders; many of our best memories will be those screw-ups and overcoming them. I'd hate to deprive anyone of the missed opportunities when everything goes well.

A bar we saw as we headed out of Grand Folks this morning.