Woke up at 4:00 in the morning with a possible solution to our problem, discussing it with Hubby once he woke up much later. Since the main problem seems to be the ranger worried about the trees, I figured, what if we created our own tree? If we could get a stand with a heavy bottom, a tall pole, and several guy wires, I figured we could built a structure that would hold the weight of the highline on one end, using one of the hitching rail posts on the other. The question was what to use, so I decided to leave early and go to Lowes to see what I could find. After doing a quick wash of the van and truck and a couple of the muddiest spots on the RV and horse trailer (all while also refilling the fresh water tank), I headed out, first to Rochester, where I found what might be the perfect solution, a heavy deck umbrella stand, and a pole that would fit into it. Just as I was leaving and heading to another store, the sky opened up with such a tremendous downpour that every parking lot turned into a river. After waiting for the rain to abate, and looking at the radar and seeing that more was on the way, I decided I’d better head out and get out of the storm. After a few miles, it started to lighten up, and by the time I was halfway to Minneapolis, the roads were dry and the sky was mostly sunny. Arrived just under an hour from my niece’s flight, got a gate pass from the airline so I could get through security and only had to wait a short while before her plane got in. She was one of the first off the plane, and we headed down to baggage claim where we had to wait over ten minutes for the bags, but they also came out nearly first, and off we went! Even though they had provided her some food on the airplane, I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so we stopped at McDonalds along the way for a burger and fries. We stopped again in Rochester to pick up groceries and a prescription for Hubby that I had phoned in earlier, and once more in Spring Valley to get gas. Arrived back in camp about 9:45, later than we had thought, but only shortly after it got completely dark. Hubby said it had rained heavy for better than 5 hours!! Some storm! We unloaded groceries, gave her the grand tour, chatted for a little bit, then she headed out to the tent to get set up and go to bed. We followed suit, watching a short half-hour Gunsmoke before we headed to bed.
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