Click on a photo to enlarge it.
After doing a couple of short walks and getting a shock from a snake that ran across the path in front of us, we went
to the visitor centre to find out what sort of snake it was and nearly ran over another snake on the way! The ranger
said that they were probably garden snakes but our conversation kept getting disturbed by loud farting noises!! The
ranger had to explain for probably the umpteenth time that the noise was caused by the wind getting in through a
crack in the window!
After battling to drive through the wind, driving passed more snakes, and finding that the campsite we had planned to
stay at had no water, we changed plans and drove further north to Minot and stayed at a KOA (Campgrounds of America)
and finally got there at 8-30pm. On the way we had to pull over for a monster tractor that was driving towards us and
took up half our side of the road aswell. At first, we couldn´t work out what it was. There was just this huge thing
coming towards us and we saw that cars up ahead were driving off the road to make way for it! We have never seen such
a monster tractor - and, it was driven by a woman!!
On the next day we both treated ourselves to a hair cut and bought an electric whisk for $7 from Walmart. Why we
never thought of buying one earlier is a mystery, seeing as we only use it to make cakes and we need a hook-up to
use the oven anyway! (That afternoon, Helen tried it out and made a butter pecan cake.) Then we went to a second hand
bookshop that was so full of books, there wasn´t any room to walk between the aisles. We didn´t even see the owner at
first because she was sitting in a very small space and totally surrounded by piles of books!
The next day we drove the whole day and Kirsten wrote on the computer whilst Helen drove so that we could do an
update for our website at a library on the way. We got a free night at a small campsite near the border with Canada,
as there was no one around to pay and nowhere to put any money to pay for the night.
On Thursday 6th May we drove across the border, which only took 40 minutes, but they thought we were going to import
Winnie! We found out that the petrol prices in Canada are even higher than in the US and the food prices are also
high. Then we headed for a small town which is a days drive from the fishing lodge, where we will be spending the
summer. We spent 4 nights relaxing before all the hard work to come. The only problem we had was that all the
campsites were still closed for the season and the ones that were open, did not have any water switched on yet as
the overnight temperatures were still below freezing. We moved to a different RV park on Saturday and they managed
to get the water switched on for us so that we could get a shower. We also had to get Winnie ready to be parked in
the outback - emptying tanks, cleaning them out, putting food into boxes so that we wouldn't have to leave them
inside Winnie throughout the summer and get broken into by hungry bears!
