Monday, July 22, 2013 - Travel Day to Forestville/Mystery Cave State Park, MN

Woke up early, packed up, flushed out the tanks at the dump and hit the road by 8:30. Dropped mail off at Spring Valley, got an electrical adapter Hubby needed for the generator at an RV store north of Rochester, had stops at Walmart, Tractor Supply and for fuel before arriving at the park, having gotten misdirected by my GPS and essentially circling the entire park before finding the main entrance. It was a bit disconcerting, as at the end of the road they have a sign that there is a bridge out ahead, but nothing to indicate whether it's before or after the park. I quickly called and confirmed we could get through, and soon got to the office, where we got all signed up and registered for the next ten days. Fortunately, the site we had picked out on the campground map and Google Earth turned out to be just as good as we had hoped, and was available, so we've found ourselves a nice private site completely surrounded by trees, with a very long pad so there's easily room for all our vehicles. Unfortunately, MN is another state that thinks you can put horses at a hitching post for days at a time, but we did find a couple of trees to set up a highline with only minimal interference with the fire grill. Although we have electric here, water is limited to just a few spigots, one of which is across the road from us, so we ran out almost every hose we had to reach it and started filling up our tanks. Meanwhile, a thunderstorm popped up, so while we were trying to solve our siphoning problem (we had bought the hose we needed at Tractor Supply), we managed to get pretty wet in the process. Frankly, I didn't mind, it had gotten pretty hot just before the storm, and the cold front brought fabulous relief! Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be much cell phone signal here, though I did manage enough to get online to check my email, but not enough to make a phone call. I was hoping to change my neice's reservations from the St. Paul airport to the Rochester airport, but I ended up driving out of the campground several miles to get a good enough signal, only to be put on hold for 20 minutes, then immediately transferred to another department that started with a recording saying the wait time could be as much as an hour! Didn't have the battery life for that, so I ended up getting back to the camp at 7 empty-handed. Meanwhile, Hubby had put up the highline and fed everyone, though he hadn't put up the satellite dish because I had it with me in the van (plus it really takes two to do it properly). So we settled in for the evening using the DVR as our entertainment, knowing that most of the news would probably be all about the new prince that was just born in England today, to Kate and William anyway.