Sunday and Monday, July 21st and 22nd, 2013
We arrived in Welcome, Minnesota late Saturday afternoon just in time to enjoy a small town annual festival. Sunday we went to the VFW hall to have a pork chop dinner with the locals. We passed on the parade since we didn’t think there were enough people in town to make a parade. We stopped along the way to see the Corn Palace. The Corn Palace is a structure that has murals on the sides made from corn, grain, rye and other locally grown products. We left Sunday in search for a Verizon Wireless factory store and found one twenty miles from our destination. We purchased a Samsung Galaxy S4 telephone and were ever so happy to rid ourselves of the Samsung Galaxy S3 on Straight Talk. We were very disappointed with Straight Talk since they will only connect to Sprint towers without roaming. We were out of coverage as soon as we left Sparks. There was no coverage in the entire states of South Dakota and Wyoming.
We are now at the WIT (Winnebago Itasca Travelers) Grand National Rally in Forest City, Iowa. When being escorted to our parking spot we had to wait for a 1907 steam tractor to pass. Bill liked seeing that. It was one big tractor. Today I drove a 2014, 450 HP, 42 foot diesel pusher motor home during my “Women on Wheels” class. I did okay until it came to backing up. Bill never showed me how to back up; as a result there were a lot of orange cones with black marks on their side. The inside was absolutely beautiful. The upgrades since we bought ours 13 years ago were all in plain sight. The refrigerator was the size of one in a home and there was a large, flat screen television atop a fireplace among other things.
I went to the vendor’s area today and was extremely disappointed since there were only about 40 vendors. I am accustomed to FMCA rallies where there are in excess of 500 vendors. We didn’t buy a thing; however, we did purchase servicing for our Blue Ox tow bar. Bill went to a 1:00 p.m. seminar and I stayed in the motor home. He was back within 30 minutes. The seminar was in a tent with no air conditioning. Many of the seminars are scheduled in tents. I can’t understand why they did that.
On our way to our parking place we noticed storm shelters on the map and on certain buildings in addition to an extremely large siren mounted on top of a telephone pole. It rained hard this afternoon for about an hour. Later while I was walking Daisy a man told me that we just narrowly missed being in the path of two tornados. We heard that last week (when many arrived for this rally) that lightning hit a TV antenna on top of a motor home and it took out four motor homes. I guess snow and excessive heat is nothing to complain about. We are very lucky to live in Sparks.
