Left Lake Mitchell Campground in Mitchell, South Dakota on Sunday, July 27th around 9:15 am on an almost 6-hour drive to Viking Vines Campground in Buffalo, North Dakota for a 3-night stay.
The road out of Mitchell was SO bumpy that partway through our drive we had to pull over and stop so we could use our bathroom. Our bladders were bouncing all over the place! Happened to be a Historic Marker as well, so we learned a little something while relieving ourselves.
Here’s a short video showing poor Bella putting up with the bouncing on the bumpy road.
Arrived around 2:30 to find 86 degree temperatures. But, I see in my brother’s town of Tampa it reached 100, so I don’t feel so bad.
Viking Vines Campground
Viking Vines is an RV Campground on site with a vineyard. Usually if we’re staying at a vineyard it is as boondockers who, in exchange for a free place to park overnight, agree to purchase some wine. And we’re always happy to do so, lol. But this is an RV campground right next to the vineyard, so we paid for our site with no obligation to purchase wine. Which was a good thing because the tasting room was closed for most of our stay.
The sites are gravel and grass, but fairly level with water and electric hook-ups. There are 14 sites and about half of them were occupied. All older adults so the stay was nice and quiet, and the atmosphere of the vineyard was relaxing.
We enjoyed a nice cool, chicken salad for dinner, so that helped alleviate the high temperatures.
Walnut Cream Pie
Monday we drove 10 miles west to Tower City Cafe for a Walnut Cream Pie. You may remember when we were in this area two years ago and the story about the Walnut Cream Pie. If not, you can read about it at that link.
Sadly, the place has new owners and they don’t make Walnut Cream Pie any longer. In fact, if you’ll look at the photo of the pie case in that post you’ll see it is packed with pies. Not so any more. There were three and a half pies in the case when we arrived Monday at midday. In addition, we were told they are short-staffed so a lot of pies don’t get made any more.
Further evidence of the decline was that we were there at lunch time and only one table was occupied in the cafe. Two years ago the place was packed at lunch time.
It was very depressing as my taste buds were salivating at the thought of a bite of Walnut Cream Pie being in my mouth.
Later that day we were supposed to drive east to Fargo to show Cindy the wood chipper from the movie Fargo at the Visitor Center. But I really didn’t feel like making a 75-mile round trip just to see the wood chipper, so we decided not to do so. It’ll still be there some day when we’re closer.
We spent Tuesday reading, writing and relaxing in preparation for the next leg of our trip on Wednesday.
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