Vehement Solutions for Trivial Problems

Saturday, October 24, 2026

Camping 2026

We started the season with a bang in early May by driving to Pella IA for their annual Tulip Festival. I'd been wanting to visit this festival for years, and I had a campsite booked well in advance for the 2023 festival, but we ended up going to Ireland during that time instead. Then our spring trips to Japan (2024) and Egypt (2025) thwarted the next two years. These are high-quality problems, as my sister says.

We left at 6:30 on Thursday night after Andy was finished coaching (another year with Bloomington High School boys' volleyball) and I used a hot spot to facilitate a church Mission committee meeting in the car at 7. We made it to our campsite, Robert's Creek West in Marion County, at 11:30 PM and were in bed at midnight. The next morning we left camp without coffee and breakfast, planning to get breakfast in town, which was only a few miles away. Pella is absolutely charming, and they get a huge turnout for this festival. Unfortunately, there weren't many tulips left to look at as there had been a few hot days in April that shortened their longevity.

We started by waiting in line for the Jaarsma bakery, where I bought a bunch of treats, including a Dutch letter with almond filling. The bakery line grew through the day, to as many as 50-60 people in line. We ate breakfast in a cafe (Harriet was invited in with her vest on). We toured the Pella historical village & Vermeer windmill (eating another Dutch letter at the museum bakery). The parade was extensive- so many participants and marching bands. We got an afternoon beer at the Peanut Pub and then got Mexican takeout to eat back at camp.

A few surviving blooms

Who doesn't love a display of wooden shoes?

We got to go to the top

Making Dutch letters at the museum

Parade and clog dancing

The tulip princesses love Harriet

Since we'd done a pretty bang-up job of seeing Pella in one day, on Sat morning we started the day with fried Spam and Dutch pastries, then headed to the Amana Colonies, another site we'd been wanting to see for quite a while. We spent the day exploring, and had a filling German lunch at Ronneburg.

Lunch at Ronneburg

We left about 3 PM with the plan of making it partway home and finding a spot to park the camper for the night. We stopped at the Acme greenhouse, then continued north, deciding to press on to the Bass Pro in Owatonna for a new fish finder for Andy. At this point, we decided to just keep going home, arriving late and happy to hit the bed.

We had Beaver Creek booked for the weekend of May 29-31 but decided to cancel so we could do more work on projects at the stuga ahead of a new deck being built. In July the camper was a useful guest bedroom for Sally when we needed an extra one at the stuga.

Labor Day

We tried a new state park, Scenic, 45 miles north of Grand Rapids. It took us almost 5 hours to get there on Friday afternoon (traffic, plus some questionable guidance from Google maps). When we arrived about 8:30, there was a camper already parked in our reserved campsite. We called the ranger and she sent us to an unlisted overflow spot, then the rangers corrected the issue Sat morning so we were able to move to our booked spot. The towering Norway pines in the park are majestic. We did two great hikes- one on a glacial esker and one to see the fire tower (fenced off). There is a great CCC lodge in the park. We rented a canoe and took Harriet on a canoe ride to the other side of the park and had a picnic at one of the canoe-in camp sites. We cooked a smoked sausage, onions and peppers dish Sat night and pork chops with onions and sour cherries on Sun. I made apple crisp. On Monday morning Andy got in one last kayak then we hooked up and left for the drive home about 9:30 AM.

View from the hammock

Majestic Norway pine

October

Our 2-week trip to Utah and back gets its own post.

We took the camper in to Fleet Farm have it's bearings packed, $50, and it's ready to store for the winter. We stored it at the State Fair again, this time in the Horse Barn rather than the usual Education building.

Dropping off for horse barn storage

Thursday, October 22, 2026

Creating a Rock Garden

Finished!

The stuga came with this triangle patch of weeds and stumps, and we decided to upgrade it to a no-maintenance rock garden.

Original weed bed, as shown in real estate photo

We used a chainsaw to trim the stumps to ground level then covered it with weed fabric. I ordered the 36" metal dala horse on Etsy. We had fun asking visitor to bring a rock to contribute. I spent a number of hours by the side of the roads digging rocks out of the ground, which was arduous work. We also brought about 6 pails-worth of rocks from the North Shore in two trips.

Fabric, a few existing rocks, dala horse is secured with bricks

Friends bring rocks- Renee

Max and Rochelle bring a few big ones from their place

First batch of rocks from the north shore- July

In mid-Aug. Making progress, still bare patches. The painted wood mushroom is from a local craft fair

Digging rocks by the side of the road

In early Sep I found a really big rock about a quarter mile from the stuga by the side of the road. I had to convince Andy to get in the car and both lift it and wrestle it into the car. It was REALLY heavy. It's a good thing we didn't drop it and crush a foot. We won't take the risk again, but I do really like the way the big rocks look.

Will & Cara help gather rocks at the North Shore- Sep

Friday, October 16, 2026

National Park Quest

2009

Andy has a quest to get to all 63 national parks. We've visited 30 so far.

National Park	State	Year
Gates of the Arctic	Alaska
Glacier Bay	Alaska	2017
Katmai	Alaska
Kenai Fjords	Alaska	2017
Kobuk Valley	Alaska
Lake Clark	Alaska
Wrangell-St. Elias	Alaska
Denali	Alaska
American Samoa	American Samoa
Grand Canyon	Arizona	2010
Saguaro	Arizona
Petrified Forest	Arizona
Hot Springs	Arkansas	2021
Channel Islands	California
Redwood	California
Lassen Volcanic	California
Pinnacles	California
Yosemite	California	2009
Sequoia	California
Kings Canyon	California
Death Valley	California
Joshua Tree	California
Mesa Verde	Colorado	2018
Black Canyon of the Gunnison	Colorado
Rocky Mountain	Colorado	2006
Great Sand Dunes	Colorado
Dry Tortugas	Florida	2021
Biscayne	Florida
Everglades	Florida	2021
Haleakala	Hawaii
Hawaii Volcanoes	Hawaii	2022
Indiana Dunes	Indiana
Mammoth Cave	Kentucky
Acadia	Maine	2003
Isle Royale	Michigan	2025
Voyageurs	Minnesota	2013
Gateway Arch	Missouri	1997
Glacier	Montana	2009, 2025
Great Basin	Nevada
Carlsbad Caverns	New Mexico	2018
White Sands	New Mexico	2018
Great Smoky Mountains	North Carolina and Tennessee	2011
Theodore Roosevelt	North Dakota	2020
Cuyahoga Valley	Ohio
Crater Lake	Oregon
Congaree	South Carolina
Badlands	South Dakota	2006
Wind Cave	South Dakota	2006
Big Bend	Texas
Guadalupe Mountains	Texas
Virgin Islands	USVI
Bryce Canyon	Utah	2010
Zion	Utah	2010
Capitol Reef	Utah	2026
Canyonlands	Utah	2026
Arches	Utah	2026
Shenandoah	Virginia	2013
North Cascades	Washington
Olympic	Washington	2008
Mount Rainier	Washington
New River Gorge	West Virginia
Grand Teton	Wyoming	2009
Yellowstone	Wyoming	2009

Thursday, October 15, 2026

Utah Loop- Camping and National Parks

Colorado River, Moab

We enjoyed our trip to Glacier and Banff so much that we thought we'd do another 2-week camping trip, this time to National Parks we hadn't been to in Eastern Utah, and a stop at Custer state park on the way back home. We decided on early Oct so Utah wouldn't be so hot, but before we needed to store the camper in later Oct. While we tried to thread the needle with timing, it was still hot in Utah (daytime temps of 85) and we were a bit too late in the season for Custer, which was in the process of shutting down for the season.

Once again, reserving camping sites had to be done well in advance. We reserved the Blue Bell campground in Custer and the Moab Rim campground both on April 3, over 6 mos in advance. It also helped that we were booking for lower-peak days.

We drove a total of 3,646 miles in 13 days, including a lot of elevation changes. Our SUV struggled with towing on the inclines in the Rockies, overheating several times which caused us to pull over and let the car cool (20-30 min). This earned our SUV the new nickname of Little Blackie (from the stalwart horse in the movie True Grit). Driving through Colorado in the dark was particularly challenging (for us Midwest plains folk), with a peak elevation of 11,158 at the Eisenhower pass west of Denver before entering a long tunnel. I almost needed to breath into a paper bag on towing through that. The steep emergency ramps for failed brakes also freak me out. We simultaneously discovered our camper brake/light connection wasn't working as it ought to, which could have compounded the difficulties. We hired a mobile RV technician to come and fix us up in Moab which helped a bit on the return drive (although we still had a couple of overheating incidents on long inclines). A reminder that travel entails adventures along the way.

We traveled in 6 states (MN, SD, NE, WY, CO, UT), saw three national parks and six national monuments, as well as two Utah state parks. One of the aspects we've really enjoyed about driving is the ability to watch how the landscape changes in different regions, sometimes quite dramatically. The high desert in Utah was intense- very strong sun with the elevation, hot, arid and dusty. We hiked for hours on rock face- another new experience for us. While striking, we came to acknowledge how much we missed seeing trees. We took a 2-night break from camping in Steamboat Springs and stayed in a hotel, surrounded by plenty of beautiful trees changing colors.