July 7-9

Sunday we moved down to Whitewater State Park, in southeast MN, on the Whitewater River. This was on a list of top 10 state parks. It is much better than any of our region’s state parks, but not as nice as our gold standard, Michigan’s.  It has an excellent ranger station and nature store. The sites are large and the web reservation system is excellent. They have electric, even 50 amp, but no water. We’ll be here until Friday, and use this as our base to tour the region. This park is so far down topographically from the surrounding towns that there is NO cell phone service, so no internet, calls, etc. We will send this out when we come up for side trips.

This is the Bluffs region of the state, where the melt waters from the glaciers carved through the land leaving very high riverbanks, extending up 100’s of feet.  The land here was mostly sedimentary rock, which was easily washed away by the melt waters. Occasionally a pillar of much harder rock would be left, caused by an inclusion of magma from a fracture in the crust. These leave some interesting features as we drive along. (The preceding geology lesson provided by our expert resident geologist and teacher, Elizabeth.)

Those of you who were with us a few years back, or who have gone backwards through this blog, may remember similar bluffs (without the pillars) from our trip to Wisconsin, as we camped on the banks of the Mississippi. We are about 20 miles west of the big river now, and will go back to St. Paul by way of Route 61 along the river through Red Wing.

We’re going to tour and relax here for a few days, and tend to a refrigerator issue. Our fridge and freezer have not been keeping up with the extreme hot temperature of last week, on either gas or electric (61 F). We took it in to an RV service shop, Monday, where the tech diagnosed very low gas pressure 5 vs 11. This explained the poor performance on LP, but not electric. After replacing the regulator, the fridge performed fine on both gas and electric. I’ll leave the explanation to those with more experience… Any of you Fire Co. campers ??????

I was going to include some pictures of the bluffs, etc. but didn’t have time to get them organized before we came up today. Sorry!!