Our first stop was in Sioux Falls, SD.  It took us a lot longer to get in last night than we imagined it would.  I guess that’s what you get when you only drive 55mph.  We decided that the best way to look at it was in terms of time vs. money.  We have all the time we want just not all the money we want; it was better for us to drive slowly and be more fuel efficient than it was for us to get there faster.  After all, this adventure is about the journey, not the destination!

Our first mistake of the night: we found a campsite and spent a good amount of time getting the RV parked and all settled.  Then we went up to the office, which was closed, to pay for the night.  There they had a convenient map that showed all of the open sites; ours was not one of them.  In fact, this campground has lower and upper portions and the entire section around where we parked was closed.  So we packed it in again and found a different site in the area that was actually available.

We decided to pay for all three nights that we planned to stay here.  Our site was unfortunately located alongside a highway and traffic noise was…present.  Oh, and did I mention all the airplanes flying overhead?  Those were nice too.

We decided this morning that we would try to move to my friend’s driveway instead, not only to save some funds but also to be closer to her.  And hopefully in a quieter location.

So this morning, we packed up again, got part of our money back from the office, and tried to park in her driveway.  This was a mistake.  A big mistake.  You see, her driveway is at a slant and then it levels out on top.  Our hope was to get up to this nice level part and then park for the next couple of days (hoping that the city of Sioux Falls would be cool with this).  We did not succeed.  Here’s what happened:

We made the turn into the driveway just fine.  It was tight, but Andy is a skilled driver.  As we started to climb the slope, the back end went down and our hitch dug into the cement of the driveway, making a very loud and terrifying noise as it chipped away at the nice cement.  Shoot, now what.  We couldn’t just back down the driveway again because the angle we were at would cause the hitch to dig further into the ground.  So what happened?  We thankfully used our brains.  We jacked up the back end of the RV with our leveling jacks, tried to take the hitch off (unsuccessfully), and then proceeded to put a piece of wood under the hitch so that we wouldn’t damage it or the driveway any further.

With this piece of wood in place, we were able to back out without causing any more damage.  With our heads hanging low, we made our way back to our original campsite and set up camp once more.  Lesson learned!