Hometown Visit

After leaving my brother’s home in Eaton, we continued eastward towards my hometown of Yankton, South Dakota.  We stopped over a night at Lake Maloney State Recreation Area south of North Platte, Nebraska.  This is a very pretty campground located right on a large reservoir with a lot of boating activity.  The sites are large and of the 40 or so electric hookup sites, we were one of 3 campers.  Of course it is Sunday evening so the weekenders have left.  Here are some scenes from this campground,including a nice sunrise at 5:30 am:

 

The original plan was to stay over a night in northern Nebraska, but we decided to pull  all the way through to Yankton.  The biggest adventure on the drive was when I tried to save a few miles from the journey by taking a straight route from O’Neil, NE east instead of curving southeast then back north again.  It looked like a piece of cake on the map, a nice straight line east out of town.  The nice straight line turned out to be a paved, but narrow country road through farm country and up and down the rolling hills of Nebraska.  We often found ourselves behind very large and very slow moving farm equipment.  It seemed forever before we came onto Nebraska 14 north to Niobrara.  A note of history here, my great grandfather on my mothers side homesteaded in this area in the 1800’s and I have a copy of the original homestead document.  Someday it would be interesting to go to the county records department and find out where that land is and go see it in person.

We arrived in Yankton about 3:00 o’clock and found exceptionally cool and dry weather for this part of the country.  My sister-in-law, Joanie, had told us that a severe wind storm had passed through the area a week before blowing down many trees at Chief White Crane SRA, our campground destination.  When we arrived, we found the campground pretty much cleaned up of all fallen trees.  There were some large uprooted tree trunks left around, but the fallen trees and branches had been removed from the facility.  This is one of the nicest campgrounds we have ever visited.  The sites are spacious and the pads are paved and level and there is electricity on site.  Here is a picture of our site on this trip:

Tuesday morning we restocked on food and supplies at the local Wal-Mart Supercenter and filled up the truck with the lowest price diesel on the trip at $2.85 a gallon.  I had arranged to meet my brother Larry to go fishing in the Missouri River nearby at 1:00 pm, so I had purchased a 3 day fishing license and some bait.  After 3.5 hours of fishing, I had brought in two fish to small to comment on, but Larry pulled in 4 large fish in the last half hour.  Here is a picture of Larry and his fish.  That is Lake Yankton in the background, not the Missouri River.

Larry and I did the fishing thing again on Wednesday with no more than a few bluegill to show for our efforts.  In the evening, we prepared a picnic supper for Larry, another brother Danny and his wife Marcia and my nephew Chad.  Grilled and broasted chicken, potato salad and baked beans were the main items on the menu (good country cuisine).  We had a good visit with all of them; showed off pictures of our travels so far this summer and sat around a nice campfire until breaking up around 10:00 pm.

Larry, Rosie, Chad (standing), Marcia and Danny.

It is now Thursday morning and the humidity is slowly returning to southeast South Dakota.  It is a good day to be heading west.  The magic line for bearable and unbearable humidity seems to be the Missouri River.  We will be crossing the Missouri early this afternoon on our way to my family reunion in Colome, SD.  Interestingly, the reunion is held at a farm about 6 miles south of the land that my mother’s parents homesteaded and where my mother grew up.  We will stay at the reunion until Sunday; then head north towards North Dakota with one more stop in a South Dakota SRA.