After our second visit to Bismarck, we took the camper to the extreme northeast corner of Minnesota to visit friends Jon and Cathie.  (As mentioned in a previous post, we stopped along the way at Valley City to visit Lynne & Steve.)  The Ringen’s cabin is on a hill overlooking McFarland Lake.  What a view.  We went on several nice hikes, one of which began with a prolonged bushwhack through the forest behind their cabin.  Despite some skepticism on the part of the distaff participants, we found the hiking path just about where we expected to.

Jon and I attempted to start the larger of his two boats, but didn’t succeed.  So we used the smaller one to pull the larger one away from the public dock and to the Ringen’s dock.  On another day we all took the smaller one on a tour of the scenic lake.

We ate like royalty during the visit, with grilled pork loin and coq a vin and turkey and pizza and homemade ice-cream.  We spent a lot of time just relaxing and talking.  We played Mexican Train dominoes, which provided me an opportunity to extend my string of humiliating defeats.

We had gorgeous weather for almost all of the visit.  On the eve of our departure it rained, which meant that our return down 17 miles of gravel road to Hovland was, um, soupy.  When we stopped at Grand Marais to hook our “dinghy” back to the camper, we discovered that the retractable stairs, below the door of the camper, didn’t retract so well any more.  We scraped off as much as we could, and used a little water to attempt to clear the joints of the mechanism, but concluded that a visit to a repair shop would be needed.  (This conclusion was strengthened by Barb’s fear that the steps had been damaged on the way up to the Ringens when I hit and sent into the ditch a plastic traffic cone at a highway construction site.)  Fortunately, a more-thorough cleaning job at a camp ground that night resulted in a return to full function.

Our ultimate destination, as we traveled south, was the Twin Cities area.  But our account of that visit will await the next edition of the post.  Until then, watch out for traffic cones.