Lake Sakakawea State Park North Dakota – NNs On the Wind

August 10, 2019August 10, 2019 Kathleen Ennen

AUG 9-11, 2019 – Lake Sakakawea, ND

This is a large and beautiful park on a large lake impounded behind Garrison Dam, built by the Army Corps of Engineers. We are here for 3 nights and look forward to staying at this beautiful park.

There’s a full service marina and store and a nice collection of boats including cruising sailboats in the range of 30+ feet. Looks like a nice area for sailing as well.

The campsites have water and electric hookups and are spacious and nicely laid out. We had to move our second night as we couldn’t get all 3 nights in one spot. Site 108, for 2 nights, has a terrific view of the lake. The facilities are clean and the showers are terrific. This would be a great place to return to except that it’s a billion miles from anywhere we’re likely to be in the future!

Aug 10

After a lengthy morning rain the sun came out and there was a cooling breeze. It was time to take a long walk from our spot at the northern tip of the park to the mid-way point where there’s a boat ramp and a swimming beach.

Turns out the swimming beach is a very popular place. Lots of kids and lots of people called “Grandma” or “Grandpa”. What better way for kids to spend part of their summer – with grandparents who take them camping where they can go swimming, have campfires, and maybe even have ice cream now and then. Seems every town we’ve seen recently has a place prominently displaying they have ice cream. There were also kayakers and stand up paddle boarders. Beautiful day in a very idyllic place.

Tomorrow we unmoor and head east again, now towards Fargo ND. We have several upcoming stops to make. Fargo is where we will get the muffler tail pipe relocated to in front of the rear wheel so the leveling system can be installed next week. Friday we’ll be in Iowa City for an appointment with a Mercedes Sprinter shop to see if we can diagnose a new sound from the transmission. It comes when downshifting from 3^rd gear, on a hill, and sounds like we’re crossing a rumble strip on the road. Then on Monday August 19 we get the long awaited leveling system!!!

We have traveled over the years and retired in 2017, when we started on a nine month long adventure departing in December 2017. In the past we’ve traveled to Sri Lanka, Africa (several times), Turkey, and made a number of trips to Europe, and St Lucia. Our 2015 trip to Turkey, took nearly 3 weeks to explore Istanbul, Cappadocia and the areas in proximity to Izmir.

This is a chronicle of our travels, past and present. We love to travel by trains, planes, ships, and cars – and love sailing whenever and wherever we can.

We retired from the US General Services Administration, the Federal Government’s landlord! Thom worked at planning and large scale program management of numerous projects and Kathleen, a registered professional civil engineer, was a project manager for many infrastructure and building renovation projects, including both design and construction aspects, in New England, Florida and the metro DC area. We lived in Washington DC for 12 years and upon retirement sold the house, putting a few things in a 5’x5’ storage unit and started traveling.

On return to the US in September 2018, after traveling to 21 countries, we bought a Class C RV – 2019 Thor Freedom Elite 24FE. We enjoyed our week long camping trip in New Zealand in a small converted van with few amenities, so this seemed liked a good way to tour the US. We hope to visit family along the way and as many US National Parks as possible.

UPDATE – the Covid pandemic made travel more difficult for us. We were abroad for several months when the pandemic started and returned to the US in July 2020. After several months in the RV to visit Utah and Albuquerque NM, we moved east, bought a house on the Northern Neck of Virginia, and sold the RV. For 2021 and 2022 we tended to our new house and cottage, gardens and various boats including a 18’ 1977 Marshall Sanderling catboat and a 25’ Steiger Craft Chesapeake fishing boat, and kayaks and a canoe. Hopefully travel will start again one day!!

May 2022