North Dakota

Arcola Court House, photo courtesy of my husband

We drove a long way today, made about 30-60 minutes longer by our GPS deciding not to take us on the fastest route when we stopped at this town in Saskatchewan for a bathroom break. We were not amused, but we made it, and the border crossing was easy as well. Our detour caused us to see a really interesting place in Saskatchewan called Arcola, which was once a booming town shortly after becoming a province, and there was a beautiful old court house still standing that was completed in 1909.  Arcola never grew to become the city that the province believed it would, and the old court house has been used by businesses and continues to stand as a landmark in the town, if nothing else. But it's something we would not have seen if we had gone the way we originally thought, through Estevan.

The other thing that Iearned was how many oil wells are in southern Saskatchewan. I didn't realise that there was so much oil there. We saw well after well, lines of wells, all active!

Anyway, I can't actually say a lot about Fargo, where we are staying for the night, since it's really just a stopover for the night, but we did see a couple of interesting things. We drove through Rugby, which purports to have the site of the geographical centre of North America. When we stopped for gas near it, I looked up the background of this site, and the actual location based on other cartographic interpretation has the centre about 145 miles away from Rugby, but this site exists nonethless.

Rugby, ND, with the claim to the geographical centre of N. America

North Dakota looks pretty much the same as any prairie at home, but it seems to be dotted with more fireworks stores and pro-life billboards. We passed by a huge lake called Devils Lake, which looked like a great place for all kinds of recreational activities, including birding, which would be super fun for me. We also passed by this large processing plant called Crystal Sugar that I suspected made beet sugar, based on some of the crops that we had passed, and when I had a chance to look it up, I was right! I had thought they were potato plants at first, but given the size of that factory, I thought perhaps I was mistaking them for beets. I don't know why I find that interesting, but perhaps it's because I remember learning about sugar beet production in southern Alberta for Rogers when I was in elementary school, but I had never really seen anything related to that industry before now.

Anyway, we arrived in Fargo for the night, and we were pretty tired. We grabbed a bite to eat at the nearby Burger King as it was about 8:45 pm local time by the time we checked into our hotel and what not, and we walked back to the hotel to a beautiful evening sky with a crescent moon and cooler air than the 30C we had been driving in all day. Tomorrow is another long day of about 10 hours of driving, not including stoppage time. Surprisingly I am not as tired or stiff or cramped as I imagined Imight be. I'm no spring chicken these days, but the roads are so open, and much of the highway was divided, so it made for a beautiful drive--and having cruise control here is the key. There is no way this would be as fun if we had to press the gas pedal for these long driving days.

Hopefully this link will go live since the one I added yesterday did not. Otherwise just copy and paste into your browser until I can hyperlink them using a regular computer. https://photos.app.goo.gl/6dqLRrwQkuACJY8r6