South Dakota - in the Hot Springs campground

Hot Springs KOA, Hot Springs

Thursday, 5 through Saturday, 7 August 2021

This was a strange period.  I expected to spend much of my time trying to catch up posts from North Dakota.  It's become disorienting to be so far behind because I've been seeing quite a few things in South Dakota, yet needing to put myself back in North Dakota.  Very unfortunate that I got into this position (which I'm blaming on my damaged arm, but the why doesn't matter in the end).  All I can do is plug away at getting myself out again.  But before doing that, I figured I'd better make campground reservations for the rest of the month.  

I've been seeing just how crowded the campgrounds are, and I figured that pressure wasn't likely to let up until September when most kids would be back in school.  That ended up taking a couple of days, partly because the online reservation system for SD's state parks can yield some screwy results.  At one point it told me I couldn't complete my reservation because "The Sub-Order is formed another Organization."  I called the state's reservation phone number and told the nice woman that this not only didn't make sense, it wasn't even the bad English that a foreign programmer might use.  She promised to report it to her supervisor.

On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, we had freak rainstorms with thunder and lightning and high heat.  This photo shows all of that:

Gracie, draped across the fan for the heat,
wearing her Thundershirt for the storm.

I'd specifically chosen the campsite we were in for its location - at the end of a row of campers and close to the office instead of buried in the campground.  And those things worked out fine.  What wasn't so good was that this site backed right into a slope.  Other campers could use ramps to help level them out, but I don't own any because I've always figured it'd be too hard for me to do it as just 1 person.  I see other people using them and they almost always have somebody else helping the driver out with directions or something.

The slant was a nuisance here but we've had worse so I didn't think too much about it until the last day, when the refrigerator stopped working.  And I suddenly remembered some advice I got from a couple in another campground in another state that the frig needs a pretty level surface to function properly.  Well, it hadn't been getting that level surface here and I started seeing the results.  At least I got my freezer partly defrosted before I figured out what was going on.

Otherwise, this was a good campground for us because it was nothing but hills.  The dogs couldn't get a walk unless they were prepared to go up and down hills.  Usually, Gracie is definitely not prepared to go up even a slight incline without complaining.  But here, we had at least 4 walks a day up and down and up and down, and it was good for all of us.

Of course, I had to haul my laundry up a pretty steep hill, which wasn't so great, but the machines were okay.