Amnicon Falls State Park, Wisconsin

Arrival Friday, June 26

105 Miles | 2 hours plus 3 hour layover for work and workout

About an hour into our next leg we pull off the highway onto another dead end dirt road, this one opening up onto a secluded hay farm. After a few productive work hours in the front and back offices we set up for our workout by the hayfield, which gets incorporated into our workout routine by Sunita who sends us running around ginormous double overhead high hay bales.

After the workout we have a great salad that Mari whips. Datta makes some quesadillas to keep Sibri excited about the food options and we hit the road again, heading to Duluth where Mari has located an iPhone repair service that can fix Datta’s iPhone X which has a charge port that isn’t working.

On the way out from our rest stop Sibri suddenly stops getting streaming reception on her iPad and we realize that Mari had left Sibri’s phone in the roof in order to pull a streaming signal at the last stop onto her iPad. Mari pings the phone and determines it is still sending out a signal so we circle back and forage alongside tbe road until we find it, pretty well mangled with the screen cracked, the casing popped open, but still functioning. We gingerly load it back in the car avoiding the shards of glass in tbe screen and Sibri keeps watching her movie as we head into Duluth with under an hour to spare before the repair shop closes.

Incredibly the guy manages to not only fix Datta’s X but also Sibri’s 6S, both in under an hour, and for just over $100 we are back up to full connectivity. We head over to the waterfront to enjoy some Vietnamese food and the scenic Harbor vistas of Duluth, Wisconsin.

After using up our full 3 hours of paid parking in Duluth whiles eating, shopping and sightseeing we run into a similar dilemma on where to stay that evening, knowing that the first come first serve campgrounds are bound to be full on a Friday so we decide to try our luck again at one of the by-reservation campgrounds which are all booked up, about 30 minutes from Duluth.

We pull into the Amnican Falls campground and find three vacant sites, this time out of a total of 40, so it appears they tend to run a 5-10% no-show rate even in the Summer, which makes it a pretty good bet you’re going to find a spot if you pull in after hours.

We try several times to call the camp office which has posted hours until 11pm but no luck, even though it's only about 9pm. Eventually we decide to try our second night in a row of “gypsydocking”, selecting space 7 which has been posted for a 1-night stay, deciding our odds are better of not having our morning interrupted by the site’s rightful guests. In the morning a ranger drops by and Datta chats him up getting advice on good next stops after explaining how we had tried to buy a park sticker the prior night but no-one answered the phone or the doorbell at the office. He tells us we can get one online and jot down the confirmation number on a piece of paper to put on our dashboard and we can keep a little memento of Wisconsin when our actual pass arrives by mail.

On our way out we explore the falls which are beautiful and being enjoyed by quite a few visitors, it's hot again so it's great being by the water. We feel lucky to have found two great campsites in a row at the last minute. On the other hand, the warning lights for the adaptive air and Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems have started flashing, so it appears that two nights in a row of having 1000+ lbs of weight on the hitch without support have tweaked the suspension, but the tires and suspension aren’t acting any different for the time being so we decide to push through and get them checked out when we get to our resting destination in Jackson.

Departure Saturday, June 27