Minneapolis, MN / Drive to Sioux Falls, SD

Thursday, August 11  

Auggie and I said good-bye to Liz, Bryan and Kathryn and thanked them for a wonderful stay. (Sorry, Bryan – we didn’t snap any photos of you while we were there!) 

We weren’t in a rush, so we took a final walk around Lake Harriett, very close to Liz & Bryan’s house. It was another gorgeous morning, and the lake was in its splendor. Here are some shots of the scenery. And Auggie plopping around in the lake.

We stopped at a grocery store to fill the fridge for the road. Here’s my co-pilot, getting ready for take-off. And then it was off toward Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

What a drive!

Yes, it was pretty flat. And fairly monotonous with lot of cornfields. Some may call it boring, but I found it strangely beautiful. I had also started listening to Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” on CD, which Emily back in D.C. had given me for my birthday. I listened to the first and part of the second CD on the way across the prairie, exploring the “Beat Generation” for the first time in my life. What a cool thing to be listening to the stories of Jack Kerouac hitchhiking his way from New York to Denver through the cornfields of Iowa, when we were only a few hundred miles north in the cornfields of Minnesota. It was a cool parallel journey.

As we got farther southwest into Minnesota, we also started seeing lots of grain refineries. You know you are in corn country when …

I did a Google image search last night and saw that the refineries we saw were probably Ethanol refineries. (Not knowing much about these things, though, I am only left to assume.)

Also saw a ton of windmills starting to pepper the horizon. There is a ton of wind that can tear across the prairie at full-throttle. I found out later that evening from personal experience that South Dakota gets strong weather – winter and summer – so good to see the region is able to turn some of that natural resource into energy.

We saw our first sign for Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota. It’s only 355 miles away! 5-cent coffee and free ice water. (There will be literally hundreds of signs advertising Wall Drug before us …)

Inside the van, however, I was noticing another problem. My “Check Engine” light was now on steadily. Ever since I left Silver Spring, the Check Engine light has been on and off, but always going off. I had been fiddling with the gas cap, and every time I would fill up, it would always go off within a few miles of driving away from the station. But when I filled up in Minnesota, it was on again and did not go off. My mileage has never been more than 14 miles per gallon (I know, I know – my carbon footprint is HUGE in this van!). But this time it was down to 12. Something was wrong.

When I got to Sioux Falls, SD, I was pulling in to the KOA campground where we were booked for the night. Then I noticed there was an RV dealer directly next to the campground – super! I stopped there and they told me they don’t handle any chassis fixes. But, I was in luck – there was a truck service shop just ¼ of a mile down the road that could handle a Chevy, and they were open for another 15 mins.

I drove down and the Service Manager hooked the Champagne Chevy up to a computer, which confirmed that I have a faulty O2 sensor. Ugh. I’m getting kinda sick of the things that go wrong in my ride, man! The good part of this story is, the engine is not going to blow up. And – Aaron the Service Manager said he thought he could squeeze me in tomorrow, probably early afternoon once he got the part in. Looks like Auggie and I will have some time to kill in Sioux Falls, SD tomorrow!