Trip to Bismarck

Amongst Coop’s most impressive of skills is the ability to sleep in the car. Rather then being blessed with good company I have the opportunity to enjoy the countryside, listen to the BBC on the XM radio in my rental car and contemplate life. Every so often Coop will actually wake up and want to either talk or listen to music. I am sure we will reach some sort of accommodation as the trip progresses but for now at least the snoring is not too disruptive.

Nothing in this state is close to anything else and there is little in between the places that are far apart. Little except for wheat. There are a lot of wheat fields, and the world’s largest Buffalo, which is in Jamestown. Apparently we are going to be pleasantly surprised by some other bits of randomness that North Dakotans take a tremendous amount of pride in.

The eastern part of the state is flat. Pool table flat. I drove for miles upon miles without ever having to turn the wheel of the car. I did have to keep it cranked over to the left because one of the other qualities that we have discovered over our first few days is the wind. I do not think it dropped below about 25mph until right around dinner time yesterday. Wind, cold and rain has been the theme to date.

As we head west we travel through a large collection of bumps, not quite hills but a little texture to the terrain. Bismarck sits in the Missouri River Valley and seems to have a combination of everything that the state has to offer... flat, flood plain, buttes, hills... except the Badlands.

We arrived in Bismarck in time for dinner with Bob and Susan and were greeted like family. Bob is a former Attorney General for North Dakota and currently a judge in Bismarck. Susan in the chairwoman of the Public Utilities Commission. You will find out as we travel that this state is energy rich and population poor so much of their energy resources are sold to other states. In the continuing theme of niceness Bob and Susan have been awesome. They have opened up their home, made us feel like family, given us great direction for what to do next and made sure we felt like royalty when we visited the capitol.

After dinner we headed out to Fort Abraham Lincoln in Mandan. This was Custer’s fort at what was then the western terminus of the railroad. The fort itself sits on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River and overlooking Slant Village which was populated by the Mandan Indians living in earth dome lodges. The wind on top of the guard towers at the fort were bordering on absurd but the views were spectacular and Coop was actually awake and providing good company. The earth lodges that the Mandan lived in are really neat. It is a log structure creating the dome covered in grass and mud. Inside there is a big fire pit surrounded by all of the living space. In some ways it is similar to a yurt. The earth makes it warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

Family, forts, big buffalo, earth domes and wind. It was a pretty big day.