Heaven's Helpers Soup Cafe

Our daughter here in Bismarck has been telling us about a soup kitchen up here that is operated like a restaurant. Customers come in and sit down and order their choice of two soups and two sandwiches. There is a box at the door to pay whatever you can if you can. Volunteers can sign up to work there. She and Janice and I worked a shift there on Friday and we enjoyed it and will probably go back again. They are also installing showers and a computer area there for the homeless.

On Saturday, we celebrated some birthdays at the bowling alley and then to Pizza Rance for lunch. After lunch, Janice and I went to the downtown street fair. They have a lot of food booths and we found our favorite Swedish rice pudding at one of them. Sunday's high was over 80 degrees, but the forecast looks much cooler for the upcoming days. Fall seems to be in the air up here. Today was a stay-at-home day. I worked on a couple of fixit projects here at the motorhome and our daughter came out for awhile and played a game with us.

Bismarck

I really need to write more often to keep this updated. I will try to do better. As I said in the last post, the lake was rising. This is the edge of the beach parking lot which is normally about 30 ft above the lake level. It eventually rose another 20 ft, covering the parking lots and all of the surrounding area.

As the water rose, more and more of the road disappeared.

This is the road just past our volunteer campground. The water eventually reached the campground and we all had to move to another campground on the other side of the lake for a few weeks while the water went back down. When the water recedes, all of the logs and debris that you see in the water stays in place and so there is a lot of clean up work to do to reopen all of the areas.

When the water was at it's peak level, the road across the dam was closed for about two weeks for safety reasons and only workers and delivery people were allowed beyond this checkpoint at the end of the dam. The rangers and volunteers all worked several shifts here.

One of the many beautiful sunsets looking across the lake from our campground.

We packed up the motorhome and drove it to Mt.Pleasant for the weekend of Janice's 45 high school class reunion. One of their activities was to ride on float in the Winfield parade. We went to the dinner that night and a get together afterward. The next night we went out to eat with a few of her old classmates. It was an enjoyable weekend and we were glad that we went.

On our way back we stopped at Janice's sister-in-law's house for a visit and caught these two nieces there in town also. I had never met them and Janice hadn't seen them for a long time either. It was a nice bonus for the trip.

When we returned to Des Moines, we dog sat Houdini while the Rices took a trip to Colorado. He kept Janice busy with a lot of walks around the campground.

We were in town long enough to attend the baptism of a new granddaughter.

One of the volunteer opportunities that I had for Saylorville Lake this summer since we were there later than usual was to work their booth at the Iowa State Fair. We wanted to be there for a granddaughter's tumbling performance also, so we made a day of it.

I had never been to the State fair before, so I enjoyed the day. A trip to the Iowa State Fair is never complete without seeing the butter cow. That's right, a cow sculpted from butter!

We left Des Moines on Friday before Labor Day and headed to Sioux City. This little rascal crawled out from under the motorhome when we started it up to leave.

We spent the weekend in Sioux City doing a few fixit projects and visiting our family members there. Our son-in-law was running a game convention in town that weekend so we spent a few hours there on Sunday afternoon. 

Now we are in Bismarck, ND to spend some time with family up here and getting to know our new granddaughter. I'm sure that time will pass quickly and we will have to leave much too soon.