Days 38, 39 & 40: On the Road Again

Not much happened on Monday, as the weather conspired to thwart our plans to take Joe's boat out to one of the local lakes.  So we used that as an excuse to wash the van and trailer, grocery shop and do other chores.  Alea and Joe also took a bike ride on the greenbelt, seeing where a whole neighborhood was removed after the devastating flood in 1997.

The memorial to the historic floods of Grand Forks.

Tuesday I met with a distant cousin (Neal Martin) at the local Family History Center to review some microfilm he had ordered to see if it might lead us to proof of the relationship between his 3rd great grandmother and 4th great grandfather (which it didn't, though that usually means we just need to look elsewhere).

After that, the weather was finally nice enough that Joe took us out to Golden Lake for a chance to ride in his new Lund fishing boat.  After sweating through the heat and humidity on our way to Fargo, it is easy to see why a LOT of people have boats up here, as it would be a great way to beat the heat.

Cap'n Joe & 1/3rd of his crew.

The rest of the crew: Alea and Lana, the salty sea dog.

Last night Joe took us to eat at the Toasted Frog in downtown Grand Forks, where we were joined by his co-worker Rachel and her husband Adam.  Joe is deaf, so things got a bit derailed when his iPad tablet stopped working.  On it is a nifty speech recognition app that does a pretty fair job of making it possible to converse with him.  But with that not working it made it hard to communicate, as only Rachel had a speech-to-text app on her phone, and that was less reliable than the iPad app.  So Joe had to settle for being the facilitator.  Whenever the conversation started to dwindle, he suggest a new topic of conversation.  So we all had a great time, but it was clearly a bit of disappointment for Joe.

Gassin' up before leaving Grand Forks.
(This is actually a replica building located at the Myra Museum).

Today (Wednesday) we headed south to resume our trip, after having breakfast with Joe.  It was in the upper 40s when we awoke, so we appreciated dragging our feet a bit to allow things to warm up.  When we finally got ready to ride it was in the upper 60s and low 70s with very mild winds.  It wasn't long before the flatlands of the past week disappeared, being replaced by rolling hills and dozens of Minnesota's 10,000 lakes.

It had been five days since I was last on the bicycle, and it was about 37 miles to Pelican Rapids, with the next closest campground (as described by our route map) being more than 20 miles farther down the road.  So we have made it a short day and opted to stay at Sherin Memorial Park in the town of Pelican Rapids (with a name like that, I had visions of sleeping amongst the tombstones, but it's actually a very nice park).  Since the weather has cooled off a bit, we decided that we didn't need shore power, since we don't need to run the air conditioner.  So we have an awesome campsite ($10 with showers available) surrounded on three sides by the Mill Pond of the Pelican River (I suspect the Pelican Rapids are beneath the Mill Pond).  There's an awesome little suspension bridge nearby that takes us straight to Main Street and right by the reputed World's Largest Pelican.

Our campsite at Sherin Memorial Park in Pelican Rapids.

Ditto.

The pedestrian suspension bridge.

That IS a big pelican!