St. Paul, Minnesota (2nd Annual Visit)

September 11, 2024

So far in our travels, we generally have not stayed at the same place more than once (except for our Florida winter RV park). But, since we try to include St. Paul, Minnesota as a stop every year, and Lake Elmo Regional Park worked out so well last year, we stayed there again this year.

Pleasant driving through rural Wisconsin

Lake Elmo is only a short 20 minute drive from our kids' house (yes, they are currently all renting a house together), and it has the benefit of being a very nice park in a beautiful pastoral setting. Since we stayed here last year, we were able to peruse all the campsites and pick out our favorite for this time around.

This visit was super busy--in a mostly good way. A funeral for Julie's aunt just so happened to coincide with our time in St. Paul, and we were able to drive down to Chicago for a couple of days to attend. It was good to see lots of family that we hadn't seen in a while. Of course, a loved-one's passing is not a joyous reason for a family reunion, and Julie's aunt will be dearly missed by many.

The rest of our days were busy visiting with the kids, attending their church picnic, going to a friend's 70th birthday party, playing disc golf (Julie's first time), fixing the trailer suspension (again), and fitting a new rug for our back deck. It was a great time!

We had a sushi party one of the nights at the kids' house--yum!

Our previous deck rug was quickly disintegrating, so we had a new one delivered to the kids' house. Julie is not quite sure she loves the bright new look.

Julie didn't take a ton of pictures this time around, and she completely forgot to take the usual picture of the campsite. We did manage to take a walk around the park one lovely morning.

After taking this, Julie suspected that she had taken the exact same picture last year. Sure enough, this photo is in last year's post! Julie took way more pictures last year, so if you want to see the rest of the park, go here.

Rick's corner

One of the annoyances I have had for a while is the hitch not being tight in the receiver which causes both annoying banging during driving as well as causing the receiver pin (and corresponding hole) to slowly elongate, leading to even more banging. I had tried a "standard" hitch clamp for most of last year which helped, but it really didn't do the trick. It was finally time to upgrade to the most beefy heavy-duty one I could find. The only catch was that I could not order this particular hitch clamp from Amazon (it is only available from hitchrider.com), so I had it shipped it to the kids' house. Audrey was nice enough to bring it with her to our last campsite when she visited us. Even after only one trip using it, I have to say that the new clamp is a resounding success. The hitch did not budge at all!

Look at that massive lump of beautifully shiny casting along with heavy bolts I can crank down to my satisfaction!

And just because campers will be campers, we had another suspension hanger break (just like the last one in New Brunswick). Luckily, the nice trailer place in New Brunswick had made me a couple of spares, so it only took an hour or so to jack up the camper, remove the tire, take off the broken piece and replace it with a new one. Hopefully we don't run out of spares before we make it to Florida where I can order a bunch more replacements! I suspect these parts just get flexed when we make sharp turns in gas stations and parking lots and campsites (like pretty much whenever we tow the camper anywhere) which leads to stress fractures and fatigue of the metal which eventually just break.

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