Sep 9, 20213 min read

I need to catch you up....

When I started this blog I thought it would be easy to keep up to date on our travels, and adventures. Clearly haven't gotten that bit down yet. But in my defense there has been a lot to deal with.

When I last posted I was attempting to keep you up on our trip out here. At this point I'm thinking that I'll just abbreviate the last bit of our journey before finally reaching Sioux Falls. So here goes.

Our last "Harvest Host" stop was at a place called Ninja Golf in Granger, Indiana. It really was cool. We got Stella out wandering, played a bunch of mini golf (both day and night golf) and headed out the next day with high hopes that our issues were behind us.

Well, the next day we headed out to our next stop, Wilde Prairie Winery in Brandon, SD. Alas, we didn't make it. We got to Jackson, MN and the RV lost power again. Thankfully, we got to a truck stop and off the road. We assumed it was our fuel filter, and went to change it, but had the wrong one. We were however, able to get one delivered the next day by one Devona (an absolutely lovely person from O'Reilly Auto Parts from 17 minutes away). So we attempted to hunker down in the parking lot with the generator running for AC and in the middle of a cribbage game the generator just quit.

In the interest of full disclosure this is the moment we both wanted to scream. But instead we opted to spend the night in a hotel right next to the truck stop we were parked at. To be clear, when I say "hotel" I'm using that term wildly loosely... It was an Econo Lodge. Now for anyone who has spent more than a week a year on the road, they KNOW......Yeah, just YUCK! I won't go into details, but I'm just going to say that it was a necessary evil. It's the place you go when you want to become immune to every sexually transmitted disease, as well as Covid...(don't get your panties in a bunch...it's my blog and I'll say what I want).

Anyway, we changed the fuel filter, got back on the road and were hoping that we fixed the problem. I'm pretty sure at this point you have figured out that we didn't. We got as far as Hartford, SD before we lost power again. So we pulled into another truck stop, made a few calls and decided that discretion is the better part of valor, and we went back to Sioux Falls and to a Mercedes dealership/service station for help. I have to say, if you have a break down in South Dakota, Sioux Falls is the perfect place. The guys at Luxury Auto (Steve, Brian and Cody) are our new best friends. They did everything they could to make this as painless as possible. The times being what they are makes it a very daunting task. In the end the problem ended up being an EGR valve. Because of these "trying" times, they ended up getting us a used one, since a new one won't be available until the 1st quarter of next year. These guys jumped through hoops with Mercedes for us and managed to not void our warranty in the process. Freekin' love them!

We have grown such a fondness for Sioux Falls, that we are declaring it our official new hometown. For all of my family and friends reading our blog, I truly, sincerely hope that at some point in your life you get here. You will never be the same.....in the best way ever!

We are currently spending some time in West South Dakota....once we get back to Sioux Falls I plan on spending an entire day sharing with you our adventures. Here's just a teaser for you...