Bemidji and the wrong Grand Rapids

Tuesday July 22 we woke up at our campground in Itaska State Park.   Dave took a run and when he returned I ran as well. This was my favorite run of all.  I can't even put it into words how beautiful the trail through the trees and over the wooden bridge is (you can see the pic of us on the bikes on the trail the day before).   After our runs and Peyton practicing on his new bike (he is getting better) we packed up and drove through Bemidji, MN where Paul Bunyan is king.  There are signs of him everywhere, even the restaurants are named after him.  We weren't too impressed so we drove on.  We were planning to stay in the large city of Grand Rapids.  We realized it wasn't the Grand Rapids of Michigan but since it connected two large roads we figured it was a fairly large city (Grand Rapids also sounds big).  We were wrong!  It is a pretty small town with a ton of road construction going on and a Chamber of Commerce Visitor Center that doesn't have any idea about pretty much anything.  It was actually quite funny.  Tanner and I went in to the very nice, large visitor center to get information on where to eat, where to park and where an RV park was.  She said that she cannot tell us where to eat because it wouldn't be fair to the restaurants she didn't tell us about.  She did point us to some flyers  which we used to pick a good place but then realized in the RV that the flyer with the menu on it left out one important bit of information...THEIR ADDRESS!  Then regarding parking, I asked if their was parking for an RV near the city square, which the information center was in, and she said that their was an abandoned Walmart right around the corner we could park at.  It turned out to be 4 miles up the road which was way too far for the hungry Hulsebus' to walk to dinner.  Finally we needed a campground and she pointed us to the fairgrounds outside of town because we would be close to the largest event of the year in Grand Rapids, "the swap meet!"  I actually like swap meets but it was Tuesday and the swap meet was on Saturday.  Anyway, if you ever go to the huge town of Grand Rapids, Minnesota don't bother going to the visitors center.  We ended up eating at Country Kitchen and the funny thing was the lady from the visitors center came in for dinner so I guess we picked what she would have recommended.  After dinner we decided to go against the visitors recommendation for the fairground and we stayed at Walmart.