We only had 168 miles to travel today to get from Red Trail Vineyards in Buffalo, North Dakota to the Forestedge Winery in Laporte, Minnesota so we were in no particular hurry to leave.  I was up by 7 AM, however, so I could turn the generator on and top up the house batteries before we hit the road.  I also wanted to add air to the driver-side front tire as I noticed yesterday when I checked the Pressure Pro Tire Pressure Monitoring System that it was starting to read a little lower than I would like.

Since I was up I took the opportunity to take some pictures of the property to replace the ones I inadvertently did not take yesterday and updated yesterday’s blog post with a few of them.  I also took some pictures of our two cats, Jasper and Juniper, who have been with us on this whole trip, but have not received the attention they deserve in this blog.

Adding air to the tires accurately, however, requires that they are cold and all at the same temperature.  It also requires the main engine to be running to get the air tanks up to 120 PSI.  We were parked facing north, and by the time I got around to this task the passenger-side tires were already reading 5-6 PSI higher than the driver-side due to the heat of the morning sun.

I checked the pressure in the driver-side front tire with my tire gauge, and it was reading 110.5 PSI.  This was adequate, but the lower limit of what I want to run, and at least 3 PSI lower than the passenger-side tire.  I hooked up the air hose and chuck to the auxiliary air fitting in the driver-side front bay and tried to raise the pressure in the tire.  In spite of the manifold gauge reading 120 PSI, all I managed to do was lose a few PSI from the tire.  Although the tires have held their pressure fairly well, they have lost a little bit over the course of our trip.  It has become very clear to me that we need to travel with an auxiliary air compressor that is capable of producing at least 150 PSI at the air chuck if we are to have any ability to adjust tire pressures while away from home.

We pulled out of the Red Trail Vineyard around 9:15 AM and continued east on I-94 towards Fargo, ND and Morehead, MN.  Just three miles shy of the border, detoured south on I-29 for ½ miles and exited to go to the Pilot / Flying J truck stop where we topped off the tank.  They have air pressure lines at each pump, and I started to get the air hose, chuck, and gauge out but decided not to.  We have had our PP-TPMS longer than we have had the bus, and in general it works quite well.  It has one major downside, however, namely, that the “baseline” pressure for each tire is determined by whatever pressure is in the tire at the time the tire pressure sensor is threaded onto the valve stem.  Had I removed the sensor at the truck stop, added air, and reinstalled the sensor, it would have reestablished the baseline pressure at a value that was way too high due to the tire already being hot from being driven 35 miles on I-94.  Later, when the coach sat overnight and the tires cooled off, it would have given us a “low tire” alarm, which would have been annoying.  Newer competitive products have addressed this issue by making the baseline pressure something the user programs into the receiver.  The other major downside to the PP-TPMS sensors is that the batteries are not user replaceable.  At some point they will stop working and have to be replaced at a cost of $35-$50 each.  At that point, we will probably just buy a different system with programmable baseline pressures and user replaceable batteries.

We returned to I-29 north to I-94 east and crossed into Minnesota, our ninth state (including Michigan) since we left in early June.  We had a very pleasant and uneventful drive through very pretty country; the best kind.  Eastern Minnesota was a combination of green rolling crop lands, lovely lakes and ponds, and northern mixed forests.  Our route was I-94 to MN-336 to US-10 to MN-34 to MN-64, and the roads were all very good except for a short stretch of MN-34 with seams at regular, and annoying short, intervals.  The bus ran very well, and the transmission even behaved the way I think a transmission should, shifting between gears on hills as needed with the cruise control set and no intervention from me.  This primarily occurred on stretches of MN-34 and MN-64 where the speed limit was 55 MPH.  Apparently the transmission is willing to drop out of D into 4 (or at least out of torque converter lockup) when climbing hills, something it does not do as often when I am cruising at 62-64 MPH.

The one thing I noticed on this trip was the auxiliary air system pressure gauge I had installed in the cockpit was indicating that the system would reach 120 PSI and then fairly quickly bleed down to about 105 PSI and then re-pressurize to 120 PSI, over, and over, and over…  At the same time the primary and secondary tank gauges indicated that these tanks were holding 120 PSI until I applied the brakes.

We arrived at the Forestedge Winery around 1:00 PM, pulled around back per Paul Shuster’s e-mailed instructions, got the car unhooked, and got the bus parked and leveled.  We went over and introduced ourselves to Paul.  He was busy serving wine to potential customers, so we went back to the coach and had a bite of lunch.  We then went for a stroll around the property and worked our way back to the tasting room, where we were able to sample most of his wines.

Paul and Sharon have a very nice operation in a beautiful setting at the edge of the Paul Bunyan State Forest, and across the road from Lake Benedict.  It’s a tourist/vacation/recreation area, and there was a good flow of traffic through the winery.  There is a nicely gardened sitting area outside and besides tasting and purchasing bottles, you can buy a glass of wine and sit outside and drink it.

 

Forestedge makes only “fruit” wines, and has 13 or 14 products.  Although grapes are obviously fruit, this label is used to indicate wines made from any other fruit than grapes.  (Mead, of course, is wine made from honey.)  They started with only rhubarb, and their rhubarb is still grown on the property, but their offerings now include raspberry, strawberry, cranberry, blueberry, chokecherry, black currant, apple, and pear in addition to rhubarb, as well as blends of some of these.  We sampled most of these, and purchased some of the white cranberry, blueberry, chokecherry, black currant, plum, and rhubarb/blueberry.  We won’t be able to do this at every Harvest Host location where we stop, but Paul and Sharon are also members of the FMCA Freethinkers chapter which Linda and I belong to, so there was an additional connection here.  Besides, we liked their wines!  And we decided early in our trip that we were going to purchase wines as our major travel “souvenirs.”  We can enjoy them while traveling, or once we return home, but eventually they are gone and we don’t have to find a long-term place for them in the house.

I finally shut the generator off around 3:30 PM.  I did not let it run long enough this morning to bring the batteries back up to full charge.  In generally it is not good for the batteries to only be partially recharged so I wanted to make sure I did so this afternoon.

The weather here was wonderful; blue skies with puffy white clouds and temperatures in the mid-70’s.  We are parked behind a winery, alongside what appear to be a grove of white birch (paper birch) trees, in view of orchards and gardens.  This is no part of this not to like.  While I was resting outside in one of our folding campchairs a Bald Eagle soared overhead.

 

Paul invited us for dinner, so we had to explain “the vegan thing.”  Sharon rose to the challenge, making a green salad with fresh picked greens from her own garden, zucchini and onions sautéed in olive oil, and black beans and rice accompanied by their own Raspberry Rhubarb wine.  We had a long, great conversation over this meal, including some tips on what to see and on our visit to Hibbing, MN tomorrow.  As we left their house to return to our coach his final words for the evening were to not be surprised if we heard wolves howling.  We can only hope.