8/09/08 Saturday: Riding in the tow truck at 55 mph along Lake Superior

Terry decided to call AAA for help with because the RV won’t start at all. The problem – no cell phone coverage or phone booths in the woods 60 miles or so north of Duluth in the Finland State Forest. The neighboring camper agreed to haul us to the nearby town to call for help. 30 minutes later the AAA Care Management Team found a tow truck large enough to retrieve us from up the lake 54 miles and bring us back to Duluth. The AAA person was really clueless about where we were in Minnesota and how isolated the area was. The tow driver, Garon, worked hard to get the RV going before he hooked onto us to drag us out of the camping spot. Terry had worked hard yesterday to get it started by using the battery charger on the main battery and isolating one of the other batteries to determine if it was that battery that was the problem. Nothing he tried got the engine to run. There was enough spark to turn the starter, but not enough to run the engine. Terry determined it was a bad alternator, but more likely a relay switch or the wiring was bad somewhere. After he and the tow operators worked several hours after we reached their yard in Duluth, they decided that it was the alternator going bad and probably something also in the electrical system. Two problems with the alternator problem being the easiest to solve will be tackled in earnest on Monday. The tow truck arrived at the campground about 1:30 pm and it was then 6:30pm and all were tired. The brothers are NAPA certified and Terry was satisfied that they know what they are doing. They offered to let us camp in their yard and one brother even offered his van for us to use to go sightseeing tonight or tomorrow.

After setting us up with electricity, they retired to their families and we set about leveling the RV and fixing dinner. Terry was exhausted and dinner fixings were available right in the RV. Tomorrow is another day and we can do the tourist thing then. The antenna system in the RV is grand and we found several regular channels and two HD channels on it. After several hours of the Olympic coverage, we retired to sleep in a quiet yard of cars, trucks, snowmobiles and other vehicles. I wonder how many run and I’d bet not many of them.

We are five minutes from downtown and it feels like we are way out of town. Duluth is a long and narrow city spread along the waterfront. The trees are most broad leaf trees and only an occasional evergreen tree. The winters here must be really stark with no green trees to break up the snow. Duluth has mining, lumber and tourism with the tourism lasting all year due to their huge snowmobiling and other winter activities. I think this could be a place I could live if I could talk the rest of the clan to relocate. Lots of water, not too hot, lots of trees…. Looks good to me.