Saturday, August 30, 2008

August 27-30th, Denver to St Cloud, Minnesota



Greetings!

We're in an RV Park outside of St. Cloud, Minnesota. Wednesday and Thursday were all-day sprints across Wyoming and Nebraska to Lincoln. On Friday, we started out our drive north, planning on another sprint to Minneapolis. That morning, I had emailed several of my cousins in Minnesota to alert them to my location and plans. Trudy Wasson, and her husband Boyd, responded with a suggestion that we stop by Decator to visit the Vesterheim Norwegian Museum, and indicated that they were currently there in their RV. We picked up the email at a rest stop, and made the detour a few miles up the road. While we arrived too late to see the Museum, we found the RV Park.




Boyd found us before we had even finished settling into our space. We talked for a few minutes, and then agreed to meet in their trailer after dinner to watch the Barak Obama's acceptance speech together. We enjoyed a wonderful evening of viewing and political discussion.

The next day, we visited the Museum. It's main building consists of several floors of Norwegian historical artifacts, and excellent displays describing life in the area in the 1800's. Behind the building are many structures which represent houses, a church, school, and mill which have been carefully transported and assembled for display.




Upon our return to the park, Boyd and Pat talked while Trudy and I worked to synchronize our computer ancestral records to link ourselves genealogically. That evening, after a great dinner which they prepared for us, we viewed hundreds of photos Trudy took over several visits to our home village of Vang, Norway.

Today, we drove north into Minnesota. After phoning several RV parks in the central Minnesota area, we found one with a space for us. Lots of campers are out for Labor Day Weekend, and we were lucky to find one here in St. Cloud.

Each day, we seem to make at least one new discovery, or overcome one new problem, about Matilda or the Toureg. This week, we learned more about filling and draining the auxilliary water system, opening and securing the awning, cable programming the television, and responding to inclined campsites and the Toureg's variable height reactions.

We'll be staying at this campsite for five days, using it as a basecamp for day trips to visit cousins. Tomorrow, we'll be stopping by several cemetaries, before we meet after lunch with my Aunt Eloise. She is 95, and her correspondence many years ago helped provide vital information on her parents. Next week, we'll be visiting her children, and the grandchildren of her aunts and uncles.

To view all of the photographs for the day, click on: August27-30th, Denver to St. Cloud, Minnesota

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