St. Cloud Area

Tuesday - The wind picked up this morning and gusts up to 30mph are in the forecast for the rest of the week. So, begrudgingly, I took down the screen shelter. It was really nice to have but I didn’t want to deal with trying to take it down in stronger winds. It was challenging enough today. The weather app says it’s 77° right now but it feels cooler than that due to the wind. It seems to be getting rid of the smoke!

I drove down to Buffalo, MN, for a haircut and to get the Jeep washed. All of the campgrounds we’ve been to prohibit washing vehicles. It gets pretty dirty behind the RV. It was a long-ish wait to get a haircut but they always seem to do a good job at the Great Clips chain.

Wednesday - One tire on the Jeep had a slow leak for months. My son dismounted the tire and there was a pallet nail in the tread area. He installed a patch so that should eliminate that problem. I had been adding air to that tire about once per week. I had thought it was leaking from the bead or valve stem.

We spent the afternoon with family and had dinner at a local diner/bakery. 

Friday - We got a lot of rain this morning, but it's warming up and feels pretty muggy right now. We moved from the county park to Moochdock for the weekend. The campground is full over the weekend, but opens back up next week. So we will be moving back on Tuesday, though we won't have the nice site on the lake. 

Our location is nice and level, plus there is power and water and we are mostly shaded next to a large tree. I'm not sure if it's a 15amp or 20amp circuit so I have the Victron set to max shore power of 13amps. 

Annandale, MN

Monday - This is the JPC-12 portable antenna covering 40M to 6M. Unlike the ATAS-120, which I forgot to pack, needs to be manually tuned by adjusting the telescoping whip and the center loading coil. 

To tune the antenna, I picked up a NanoVNA-H4. This is a relatively inexpensive, open source vector network analyzer. Antenna tuning is just a subset of its capability. In this picture, I’m showing the SWR (standing wave ratio) for the 20m band. 

In the morning, I was receiving stations from both coasts but by early afternoon, only high power stations and they couldn’t hear me. 

Grilled chicken for dinner. Some with a balsamic glaze and some with barbecue sauce. Half of the griddle is on low (the empty side) the rest is “off” so the chicken doesn’t overcook. 

Annandale, MN

Sunday - We are back in the St. Cloud area again for the next ten days or so. It was a relatively short travel day at 200 miles with the majority on secondary roads. There was less smoke in the morning but the further we traveled into MN, the smokier it got. 

We are camped at a really nice county park with electricity and easy access to water. In other words, we fill up the water tank and use the 12V pump. We are near the lake, which is nice, but I’m not sure if we will get to enjoy the location. It is sprinkling right now and some precipitation is in the forecast for just about every day.

North Wisconsin

Friday - This morning we did some exploring with RV friends Kevin and Charla. The first stop was to get some blueberries at a u-pick farm. Huge berries compared to Alaska wild blueberries but still tasty. We didn’t pick a lot. Just enough for dessert and to add to cereal. 

Our next stop was the Northern Great Lakes Visitor Center. I had stopped by here yesterday on the way back from Ashland when I had the RV oil changed. It has a lot of displays and a large cupola with nice views. Or nice views if it wasn’t for all the smoke from the Canadian fires. 

There were some nice murals in the stairwell up to the cupola. A very nice visitor center. There were a number of movies and I watch one on the Edmund Fitzgerald. It was a large ore ship that was one of the 6,000 ships that sunk in Lake Superior. I hadn’t realized that it sunk in 1975. For some reason I thought it was mid-century. 

Saturday - We began at the Meteor, the last whaleback ship in the world. It is a freighter that sat low in the water with a rounded hull and designed for low drag. This is the only surviving ship of that design and the design limits the maximum size. 

It was driven by the steam engine originally powered by coal then oil. This ship was built in 1896 and was in service until 1969 when it ran aground in MI. Volunteers raised money to have the ship moved to its current location near where it was built. 

After lunch, we went on the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad. A 2 hour out and back trip along the St. Louis River. There were three cars pulled by a small diesel locomotive and completely run by volunteers. It was a nice, relaxing ride with a lot of local history. 

This is the Oliver Bridge, with the train on the upper level and cars below. This was near the southern end of the train trip. A train just happened to be on the bridge when we passed.