We did not take the Dodge Ram pickup and the Fleetwood truck camper this time. I still have them, but in May of 2012 I bought a 1992 Roadtrek 190 Versatile from a guy in Auburn.
I spent this past year getting a lot of minor mechanical repairs made to the Roadtrek and made a few modifications for the extended trip. It was ready to go by our departure date. Our goal for the first night was West Plains MO which we made without a problem.
On day 2, June 11th, we left West Plains and headed toward Kansas City. From Kansas City we went North on I-29 to just south of Council Bluff IA to the Pony Creek Campground located near Pacific Junction IA.
Pony Creek is off the beaten path and my Pageplus cellular phone, which uses the Verizon Wireless network did not have a signal there. I had an AT&T Go Phone SIM card that I had purchased for use during the Alaska part of the trip since the Pageplus phone also does not work in Alaska. I had put that SIM card in one of my old unlocked GSM phones. The AT&T phone had enough signal to receive text messages but not enough to send them. Calling was out of the question. I climbed the hiking trail located behind our camp site and when I got to the top of the hill I was able to get enough signal to call out and let everyone know that we were OK. Additionally, we had the SPOT that the Joneses had given me for Christmas in 2008. It functioned well throughout the trip and sent emails with our GPS coordinates via satellite letting folks know where we were located.
We got an early start on day 3, June 12th, and headed back up I-29. We had not been on the road many miles when we came to a rest area with wifi and stopped for a few minutes and caught up on emails. After I finished with the emails, we headed back north on I-29 toward Sioux City IA and on to Sioux Falls SD. In Sioux Falls we picked up I-90 and headed for our intended destination for the night, Miller SD. When we got to Miller and went to the city park campground the road was blocked. Apparently a water line had failed and they had the entire street leading to the park closed and dug up. We went on to Pierre SD and spent the night in the Griffin Park campground on the banks of the Missouri River.
The morning of day 4, June 13, started out with a trip to the local Walmart to pick up some supplies and then to a gas station across the street to fill up. We retraced our path back toward Miller on US 14 until we got to US 83 and turned north and headed up through the center of South Dakota and North Dakota.
As we headed up US 83, just before we got to Silby SD we came to a roadside turnout on the left side of the road. It had been awhile since Dixie had a bathroom break so we stopped. There was a monument there indicating that this had been the site of Bangor SD, which according to the sign was once the county seat of Walworth county. According to this website all that remains of Bangor is the monument in the picture and a cemetary.
Just up the road from the Bangor monument is the town of Silby SD. I had a card that I needed to mail so I looked around an found the post office. As I was coming out of the post office I noticed a sign across the street that said opera house. It is not every day that I come upon an opera house so I decided to take a picture:
From Silby we continued north to I-94 where we headed west to Bismarck ND. In Bismarck we once again headed north on US 83 to Minot ND. Between Minot and the Canadian border there are several small towns with city parks that have camping spaces. We checked several of them, some were full of oil patch workers and when I say full I mean literally full, not a single space available. Others were not where the GPS thought they were. We finally decided on the city park in Carpio ND and parked there for the night.
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