July 4 through July 8, 2016 heading East!

Lake Coeur d" Alene

Custer's Last Stand

      Today is the 4th of July and we are headed to Iowa to attend a Winnebago Rally. We will be traveling with John and Linda, some friends of ours. We drove as far as Pendleton, Or.  today where we  ate dinner and played the machines for half hour, It was a long day and tomorrow we will be spending the night at Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Wednesday the 6th, we spent the night at Cracker Barrel restaurant  in Missoula, Mt. after eating a great dinner there. Thursday the 7th we spent the night in Billings, Montana, at the beautiful Cabela's  Store. They have real neat parking for Campers. Friday the 8th we stopped at the "Little Big Horn Battlefield", we haven't been there in a few years, so it was a great place to stop and eat lunch and take a break. Next we stopped in Sturgis, SD and got a campsite for the night and then headed to Deadwood for dinner and some slot fun! We found a great parking spot right away that was great, as the town was full of people as usual. We didn't spend much time there as we were tired and had a long day driving.
     We planned on stopping in Rapid City and meeting my cousin Retta and George, but they had appointments to go to, so we had a long phone visit and on the road we continued. Of course we stopped at the world famous "Wall Drug!" We walked around and looked at a lot of Black Hills Gold, we didn't buy anything, we just looked! It was so hot, we could hardly wait to get back in the motor home and the air conditioner. We traveled on to Murdo, SD the town I was born in, and stopped to visit  our friend Mel Kessler, his wife Linda, my cousin passed a short time ago and we always spent time with them in Arizona. Our last stop for the day was Pierre where we went to see my good friend Bonnie and to spend a couple of days there, out in the country.  We all went out for dinner and we headed back to her house where we were going to spend the night.  We just got there when the wind came up and the thunder and lightning was booming in the sky. It scared me half to death, we don't have that in Oregon very often and not that much lightning. Kent decided we should go into town and park in the city park. We drove through some terrible weather into town and parked in the park. Kent plugged in the electricity and it wouldn't work, he tried two more outlets and no luck. The wind and lightning was getting worse by the minute and I was getting more scared by the minute. One of the campers got up and was helping Kent try and get power. Finally about midnight he gave up and we spent the night there with no power. We'd have a generator and batteries that we can use for power, so we were OK.  The storm finally blew itself out and we went to sleep. We found out we had a problem with our power, so we headed back to Bonnies to tell her we couldn't stay, we had to head to Iowa and get it fixed. We stayed for awhile  drinking coffee and eating her yummy cookies. We said our goodbyes and headed to Kimball to take a short break before heading on to Iowa.