Movin' on to Minnesota, Land of Lovely Lakes

7/24/2016

States Pearl has slept in

After making it through the busy 4th of July holiday at Prairie Rose State Park in Iowa, we continued our journey northward into beautiful, green Minnesota, where there are so many great bike trails to ride.

The four Jackson County parks on Loon and Pearl lakes are located just a couple of miles north of the Iowa border. All four of these parks (Robertson, Brown, Brown South, and Anderson) offer camping and are very close to a paved bike path leading into Iowa, Spirit Lake, and the city of the same name.

Bike path from Jackson County, Minnesota to Iowa

Our first night we took a site in Robertson Park, which is most heavily treed, shady of the four parks. It is pretty tight for larger RVs with all the trees, and most sites were full, but we managed to back into a beautiful site #1 right on Loon Lake.

Loon Lake, as seen from our site

Unfortunately, there were quite a few mosquitoes in this shady locale, and our electric cord was not long enough to reach the power pole, which was shared with the adjacent site and on the wrong side of our rig, so we were limited to dry camping. Since we didn't like any of the other few vacant sites, we decided to move over to Brown South campground the next morning.

Brown South is a much more open park, built on a field with only small planted trees, but we actually preferred the openness after going through an intense thunder, lightning, and windstorm overnight in Robertson. All those huge trees around us and high wind gusts made for a scary night with not much sleep. In our site in Brown South, we would not have to worry about trees falling on us. And as there were several more intense thunderstorms in our first week in the site, we were thankful that we did move.

Brown South's sites are spacious, our electric cord reached just fine (no shared power poles here), and we liked it so much we extended our stay twice! This is one of the reasons we like not making reservations unless absolutely necessary; it gives us the flexibility to stay longer in nice places like this.

Here's our site in Brown South. We had a view of Loon Lake to the east and Pearl Lake (for stunning sunsets) to the west. And a pretty farm with red barns up a hill beside the park. As an added bonus, the bike path runs right behind our site -- perfect for us!