Big sky country

Saturday, June 9, 2007

GRAND FORKS, NORTH DAKOTA – We said farewell to Cloquet and were on the highway before nine o’clock this morning, driving under a clear blue sky. Our route westward brought us to Warba, La Prairie and Cohasset, and some larger centres as well, such as Bemidji and Cookston. We passed a couple of Indian Reservations, as they are called here, and a number of big gambling casinos. There seem to be quite a few place names in French – Fond du Lac, for example.
It’s interesting to see the billboards and signs by the road. In terms of eats, they advertise "pasties", which we figure must be pastries, as well as beef jerky, smoked fish and wild rice. One coffee shop we passed had a great name: Brewed Awakening.
We started getting hungry near Cass Lake and as we entered the town we saw several joggers by the road. I figured this was natural on a Saturday morning, but then I noticed they had numbers on their bellies, and there were larger clumps of them behind. Soon we spotted a Rest Area sign and decided to pull off for lunch – picking, in all innocence, one of the major points on this jogging event where families had brought their lawn chairs and water jugs to cheer on the runners. Fortunately there was a pull-through parking space available for our rig, and even an unused picnic table where we could sit, so we enjoyed a nice meal al fresco and headed on our way.
Not long after lunch we crossed the Mississippi River, but it wasn’t until we passed a sign by the road that we learned this was the starting point of THE Mississippi River, that flows all the way to the Gulf of Mexico!
As we got closer to the state line between Minnesota and North Dakota, the terrain flattened out completely and we were in the kind of place where you could see your dog run away for three days! Some clouds had rolled in, towering up in great white cauliflower billows, grey at their flat bottoms and a golden white at the top where the sun caught them. It was a magnificent sky and we drank it in for miles.
We also noticed more cultivated fields and even a few herds of cattle. Our list of animal life today included cows, horses, sheep, goats, donkeys and a lone deer, smart enough to scamper away from the roadside rather than on to it.
We have arrived at Grand Forks, North Dakota, which is connected to East Grand Forks, Minnesota by a bridge over the Red River of the North, that forks into Red Lake River. Our campground is right next to Interstate 29, so we can hear the 18-wheelers whizzing by. To me that’s a comforting sound; the world is turning as it should, and heads of lettuce and crates of corn are getting transported to supermarkets for hungry families.
I did a load of laundry this evening, carefully setting the timer so I’d be back to get the stuff out of the dryer before lock-up at eight o’clock. At 7:50 I got to the door of the building to discover it was locked already with our clothes inside! Fortunately I snagged the young staffer just as she was climbing into her parents’ car to leave. She sheepishly confessed she didn’t have a key, but called her boss to explain the problem. Not long after he came by our site and let me in, so all was well. However, our student friend may have some explaining to do to her boss about cutting out early!