Day 9- The Journey To Randall

So maybe it wasn’t the best place to sleep last night but the price was right. After breakfast we walked back into the Welcome Center and asked what we might do along our route to kill a few hours. Michele has to work today and we didn’t want to arrive too early. The very pleasant woman behind the desk told us about Munsinger Gardens in St Cloud. The minor detour would take us about 3 miles out of our way and there was no fee for touring the acres of gorgeous flowers along the Mississippi River. I’m a sucker for flowers so off we went. Sure enough, two beautiful sprawling gardens waited for us. We wandered through acres of roses, delphiniums, trickling fountains and ever other flower you could name. It was beautiful. I was particularly struck by the huge variety of peonies they exhibited. We spent about two hours strolling about, in both sun and shade and it was well worth the time. Then we started looking for a place to eat, not something familiar like Mc Donald’s or Wendy’s. We were thinking Arby’s or Red Robin or anything after a while. We found Rte 10 is just about in the middle of no where. It goes through about 5 very small towns between St Cloud and where we were headed. We finally settled on a familiar place, Subway, in the town of Randall. We were less than a mile from Michele’s house. It was great to see the boys, Christian and Jude. It has been 5 years since we were last able to visit. They’ve grown so much. We talked for several hours, played Yahtze and then retired for the evening, lulled to sleep by the gentle hum of our generator and the not so gentle blast from the trains as the crossed each road in Randall. I’d forgotten how much impact those heavy freights can have on their surroundings. I could feel the ground rumble before I actually heard them.