Still in Sioux Falls, but the news is good!

We are still in Sioux Falls allowing Orinda to recover from her surgery for an ovarian cyst. Fortunately, the cyst, while large, proved to be benign which is great news for sure. The Fairgrounds RV park has proven to work just great since it is only a couple miles from the hospital.

I also took this opportunity to reward the amazing "photo dog (Cody)" for all his hard work posing in the pictures and bought him a rawhide bone. Now, this is no ordinary bone, but a true big dog bone! Cody absolutely loves his bone and even sleeps next to it now. This seems a bit much to me.

We hope to hit the road again on Saturday and will need to head BACK to Forest City for a replacement of the microwave. The number and display panel is attached with some cheap plastic tabs that have broken and the panel starts to fall off -- bummer! This is especially frustrating since this is the second oven that this has happened on, so I am going to do some investigating on the Sharp oven.

Adding a baffle to the Norcold Refrigerator -- much better cooling

Our Norcold 1200 series 4 door fridge had a hard time keeping temperatures cool and consistent in our new 2008 Tour. We had the rig looked at by Winnebago during the Grand National Rally and Winnebago found a problem with the fans in the back and fixed it. I thought we were home free, but it turned out we still had a problem.

Last week, we had the chance to drop by Forest City again and they took another look at it. This time, they made a simple baffle out of sheet metal that forces air to move more directly over the heating coils. This simple baffle seems to have done the trick! The temperatures inside the fridge is now consistently in the mid 30's and hardly fluctuates at all. Works great! You can see the baffle in these pictures -- looks like an easy fix.

If you are having similar issues, you might give this a try.

Visiting the Falls at Sioux Falls

Sioux Falls is actually named for a series of waterfalls on the Big Sioux river. The falls were a natural barrier to water travel upstream and is one reason that the city was established where it is. There is now a beautiful park area that surrounds the falls and is a great place to spend a morning. Unfortunately, this morning was windy, cold and raining, so we spent an abbreviated time visiting the falls, but still had a great time.

Here is Cody the photo dog showing us the upper falls and the larger, lower falls. We learned that there was a very large flour mill, called the Queen Bee, that dominated the area and used the river power to power the mill. This 7 story high building must have been very impressive based on the remaining parts of the building still standing. Cody is also showing us the old power turbine feed pipe foundation that helped drive the mill.

It was fun to see the old water-powered technology as well as the beautiful falls area. This is a worthwhile stop for anyone checking out the Sioux Falls area.

The Sertoma Butterfly House in Sioux Falls

Today, we had the opportunity to visit the Sertoma Butterfly House located in Sioux Falls. Orinda is shown standing next to a small part of the butterfly display at the entrance. This is a great facility that you walk through and features over 1,000 live butterflys and beautiful flowers and plants. I was amazed at the colorful species that you could see up close and personal. There were many types of habitat and butterflys everywhere. This is a very worthwhile stop if you are in the Sioux Falls area.

The Battleship South Dakota Monument -- Sioux Falls

We checked in with Orinda's physician and learned that she will need some surgery which is scheduled for Monday. This means that we will spend a week or so in Sioux Falls and decided to stay in the Fairgrounds location.

This gives us a great opportunity to explore the Sioux Falls area and we started with the Battleship South Dakota monument. This is an interesting monument with the ship outlined on the ground in full scale -- it is like the ship is buried in the dirt so that only the top of the hull is exposed. This gives you a great feeling of the great size of the ship.

The South Dakota was the most decorated battleship of WWII and was engaged in many battles all over the Pacific. In fact, after the Japanese declared they had sunk it (several times), the South Dakota was referred to as Battleship X to confuse the issue!

The 16" guns fired a shell that weighed 2,700 pounds - like shooting a Honda Civic! The gun barrel that is on display is very impressive -- and the South Dakota carried 12 of these! By the way, this photo is actually a panorama shot consisting of 3 regular photos. Very cool technology.

Finishing Service at Forest City

We wrapped up a great service experience at Winnebago in Forest City, IA today and are pleased to report that everything on our list was well taken care of. The Winnebago service crew is very impressive, professional and can handle anything you might need. We also had a nice time talking to the other folks waiting for their coach to be finished.

Of course, we toured around Forest City and found that the town square is a beautiful and interesting spot. They had a Sherman Tank exhibited there that interested Cody.

Before leaving Forest City, we stopped at the Forest City RV Dump station to fill up with water and dump our tanks. This has to be the best RV dump station we have ever seen -- as you can see, there are some 12 dump locations here and all are well designed and easy to use.

After this, we toured back to Sioux Falls for Orinda to touch base with her physician. We ended up staying the the Sioux Falls Fair ground which has a nice RV parking area complete with full hookups. This area is very close to downtown and is quite convenient. You can see that Cody approves (Cody is on his back grinning for the camera!)

Having Service at Winnebago -- Forest City, IA

We have had our motorhome for about 6 months now and wanted to have a few minor warranty issues repaired before heading to the west coast this winter. So, we headed off to Forest City, IA to the Winnebago Motorcoach factory. This is a great facility and they have a wonderful service operation that can handle literally anything your Winnebago might need. We spent the tonight at the Winnebago Visitor Center where you can park overnight (with electric!) for free. Here you can see Cody, The Wonder Dog, showing where our Tour is parked in the visitor lot.

Service starts promptly at 7:00am, so we had to get up and out to deliver the coach to the service area (located across the street from the Visitor Center). We joined a number of other coaches in the waiting area and sure enough, a few minutes after 7:00 our technician came by to review our service order. He was super and went out of his way to make sure he knew what we needed.

We now had several hours to wait, so decided to drive about 25 miles to the town of Clear Lake, IA which is a wonderful small town on a beautiful lake (Clear Lake!). The Hobie Cat sailing races were underway which was fun to watch.

Finally, Clear Lake is also known for the Surf Ballroom, which is the location that Buddy Holly, the fifties singing legend, appeared for the last time before being killed in a tragic airplane crash right outside Clear Lake. Orinda wanted to get her picture by Buddy Holly Place!