Friday 4 September 2015

Farewell, Minnesota; hello North Dakota


We are currently eight days into a 20-day road trip across the American West. We left our home in St Paul last Thursday and headed for Darwin to see the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota! It holds the record for the largest ball rolled by one man.

We continued on to Fargo-Moorhead. Not much to see on the way. Just lots of agriculture: corn, soy beans, sunflowers and beef and dairy cattle. We stopped in Fargo for dinner at the Space Aliens Bar and Grill. It was OK.


The final leg of our journey for the first day took us Jamestown, ND. This was a nice rural town, which we spent the subsequent morning exploring. We found a replica frontier town, a bison museum and the world's largest bison statue.



We then continued on through ND to the capital, Bismark. Here we sampled the offerings of Kroll's Diner. Their slogan is 'Sit down and eat'. They have a very no-nonsense, no string attached, down-to-earth approach to cooking. I had the brisket melt and it was excellent. A popular side at Kroll's is their knoephla soup. It's a creamy soup with dumplings in it. It was not without it's charm.

The next day, we continued our treck through ND, stopping for a few hours at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It's a beutiful prarie land with many undulating hills, valleys and canyons. We also saw lots of prairie dogs. They look and squeak like guinea pigs and are possibly one of the cutest creatures ever created. We took several walks with the boys. Reuben insisted upon walking as much as I would allow him and Micah ran, tripped and fell onto a cactus. He ended up with a large number of spines in his hand. At each national park we have visited after then, he has asked 'Will there be cactuses?'


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