And The Journey Starts Again

It was a dark and stormy morning.....

Ok, ok – it was morning and it was raining when I left the old homestead. I had done my usual over packing, made sure I had enough food to feed an army because Lord knows, there are no grocery stores out on the open road. Miko was sufficiently drugged – I know, that sounds terrible, but the poor little dear really seems to get anxious when the RV is moving and it just seems like the nice thing to do to help her get by.

Today was the first day of the Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings. I was listening to everybody's opening arguments, working hard at becoming an informed citizen. After an hour or so, I had to turn it off – I found that I was getting totally angry at the whole proceedings. I was extremely angry with one side who did nothing but lie and obstruct the process and I was extremely upset with the other side's depressing statements of the state of the USofA. I'm on the road, I want happy talk. 

The problem with turning off the radio is that I had not hooked up my iPod yet so I was facing three hours of my own company. The horror!!! I decided to sing. Anybody who knows me, knows that my voice, on a good day, has a range of about three notes. This means that I am pretty much limited to only singing children's songs. There are only so many renditions of Mary Had A Little Lamb that one can sing. I then decided that I should sing the ABC song, but do it backwards. If you haven't done that, then don't. Not only do you have to learn the letter order, you have to get the cadence right. It might have been easier if I wasn't doing it all in my head and also because of the rain, visibility was only a few blocks. It hurt my head big time. As a public service you may use this little crib sheet:

ZYXW

VUT

SRQP

ONMLK

JIH

GFE

D C B AND A

Now I know my Z, Y, Xs

Wont you come and sing with me.

I had come to Pipestone MN in search of yet another Junior Ranger badge. I had been here once before in the early nineties and remember not being all that impressed. The joy of the Junior Ranger program is that you have to really get into the national site and actually learn something about it. Once you start knowing something, it becomes much more interesting. This time having learning about Sioux Quartzite and Pipestone and how this site was a very sacred site for many First Nation tribes made Pipestone very interesting. 

Minnesota has Red Rocks - Take that, Sedona!!!!

And there was a waterfall - 1st waterfall of the trip - a very nice waterfall

Many of the buildings in downtown Pipestone are built with Sioux Quartzite, which is supposed to be the second hardest stone in the world. It is a very red town.

Calumet Hotel - quite the fancy hotel

Disregard what you actually see - These buildings were actually a dark red

Side note: I heard a story about a radio DJ who was perhaps not the brightest bulb on the block. He constantly misspoke words. When talking about Pipestone, on the radio, he called it Pay-Pest-Own-EE. I tell you – some people's children.