A stressful Week

This has been a semi-stressful week for me. I just don't have the patience for following procedures  and filling out paperwork that I had when I was younger. I kept hearing how easy getting your residency and registering your vehicles in South Dakota was, and really it was not hard, but it did involve time and paperwork!

We now have our mailbox, our new address, our driver's licenses, and the mail forwarding service is going to take care of registering the Alfa and our NEW TOAD:

Yup, hours after we arrived at the Sioux Falls Fair Grounds on Wednesday, we bought a 2014 Jeep Wrangler Sahara.  The biggest dealer in town, Billion, was having a "sale" at the fairgrounds. The sale ended that evening. The purchase price of the Jeep wasn't particularly a "sale" price because they are very popular and sell quickly without great discounts. But we were satisfied.  It is now Saturday July 5th. We don't actually have the Jeep yet because it is still at the dealership getting a protective package that includes an "Invisible Bra". Our poor little Accent got quite a few dings from rocks while being towed.  We are also looking into some sort of additional protection.

Another bit of delay for our getting the Jeep "home" is we have to have the Air Force One (a braking system for tow vehicles) removed from the Accent. Craig called around Sioux Falls looking for a certified dealer, but couldn't find one who had an available time slot to do the removal, sooner than two weeks out!  He did find one near Minneapolis, 250 miles away, and will be driving up there on Monday to get it taken off. Eventually it will be installed on the Jeep.  

We have also ordered the required baseplate for the Jeep and will have it installed as soon as it arrives.  Hopefully by Wednesday.

Meanwhile we spent much of Thursday and Friday doing address changes. I don't want to do a blanket Post Office address change because I want to see what still comes to our daughter's house.  While making the address changes we have also finished up on signing up for paperless statements on the few accounts that we were still getting mail from.  As simple as it seems, it still took time and an occasional hassle because many of the online systems we worked with would not accept our box number. It took humans to override their systems. Which of course required much time waiting on hold in telephone limbo.  

I still have a few to do on Monday.

On Friday we went to the Fireworks display here at the Fairgrounds. Craig and I agreed that they were the best fireworks we have ever seen for some very basic reasons.

We didn't have to fight traffic to get there.  We simply walked down the sidewalk of the Fairground along with all the people coming from the parking lot.

We didn't have to fight the traffic going home.  We just walked back to the Alfa.

We had very good seats in the grandstands. No charge, unlike many we have been to over the years.

We were very close. In California it seemed they were so careful that they shot them off as far from the crowd as possible. Considering the free admission, definitely better bangs for the buck!

Before the actual fireworks there were hundreds of private ones shot up all around the city, particularly on the opposite side of the Fairgrounds so they were very visible. Private fireworks are pretty much illegal in California, for good reasons.   Everything is so dry at that time of year the fire danger is too great to allow beer-sodden bulls to blow things up.

And finally the ground works were pretty good.  

So if you are near Sioux Falls SD on a 4th of July in the future, consider the Sioux Empire Fairgrounds fireworks. Camping there is not bad either. Very basic, but acceptable.