Life before Kansas

After the Blossom show we needed to travel over 11 hours to reach St. Paul, MN for the Minnesota State Fair on Friday, August 26th. Evan and I decided since we had a day off before the show that we would find a campground and put up our tent for the night. We chose to stay at Devil’s Lake right outside of Baraboo, WI. It is a large state park that sees tourist from all over for its expansive beauty. Thankfully we stayed on a Thursday night because their over 200 camp sites were already booked for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Evan decided that since we had some time before nightfall that he wanted to cook a gourmet meal over the campfire. It's one of the things we miss about being stationary, cooking! We headed to the nearest grocery store and picked up all our ingredients. The finished product was a prosciutto wrapped pork chop stuffed with cilantro, Uncle Ben’s brown rice, black bean and corn, with a handmade grilled pineapple, avocado, cilantro, purple onion and lime chutney. Everything had that great smoky flavor from being cooked over an open fire.

The cooking experience at the campground made me realize I could live like a gypsy with grace and poise. No need to be ashamed of living on the road out of the back of our car. In fact, I dare say that some might be jealous of our lifestyle. Well there are ups and downs living this way but that night was definitely a high for us.

The next morning we showered and packed up which took awhile. We arrived at the Minnesota State Fair around 4 PM and met the owners from the Porch Board Base Company. They had driven several hours to bring Evan a new porch board base (which was stolen a few days later in Kansas City, unfortunately) since Evan’s was covered in duck tape. His old one still worked, it was just beaten up from the tour and they wanted to bring Evan a pretty new one.

That night we headed south to Kansas City. I had wanted to drive through the night because our friend Chuck had flown in on Thursday to his sister’s apartment to see us and I didn’t want the long drive from St. Paul to Kansas City to take up most of the daylight hours. I didn’t get as far as I wanted to, I needed to pull over and sleep around 3 AM but the next morning we arrived before noon in Kansas City.

The account of the Kansas City visit was an earlier entry so for the account of ‘what happened next’ see the entry “Living Victim”.