North Dakota

Ok folks. I can say folks because we are in North Dakota now. Here is the latest installment.

We started this morning by having the alarm clock not go off. Lucky for us Miles woke up all of 20 min after it was supposed to wake us so were weren’t that late. We ended up getting out of the hotel at the time we wanted to be out by anyway so that wasn’t too bad at all. We then went to the gas station just down the street and as we pull in a jeep drives up to the one pump that also has a diesel pump and proceeds to start pumping gas while looking right at us. Not that big a deal until his finally finishes pumping his gas and he climbs into his vehicle only to climb out a min later. He then began reading something off the open door of the jeep. At this point I am pissed and thinking to myself that whatever he is doing surely he could have done it from the many open parking spaces rather then in front of the only pump we can use.

My anger only increases as he starts checking the air pressure in his tires. I am not sure he knew how to do this properly as he put the meter in the tire 4 times before moving on to the next tire. He checked all four, letting air out of the last, before climbing back into his car and sitting their for a minute before pulling out and finally letting us get gas.

After losing over ten minutes waiting for this idiot to get his jeep out of the way we finally start our drive through the rest of Montana. Now, let me tell you about Montana. It is boring. Ok, I’m done. That is really all there is to say about Montana. It is big and boring. Oh, and the rest stops are really far apart. We pretty much looked at the same bit of countryside for 4 hours. Maybe longer. I am trying to block it out.

We did make it through Montana. I was worried slightly that it would go on forever but no. We made it to North Dakota.

I have decided that North Dakota is actually worse the Montana. We have stopped for the night in Bismarck. This means we have traveled 160 miles into North Dakota and I have actually seen more exits onto dirt roads than exits in which pavement was involved after traveling 100 feet. At least Montana had black top. Not only that but we tried to take an exit that had diesel gas clearly labeled on the sign only to travel 3 miles in a circle, through detours, finding only one gas station and it did not have diesel gas. This was in Miles City by the way. We lost a half an hour on that little adventure.

We did manage to find a Dairy Queen in ND. It didn’t take credit cards. What kind of a place doesn’t take credit cards? Luckily I had plenty of cash on me.

Another thing about driving though North Dakota is the wonderful symphony presented to you by the enormous bugs squirting out their innards onto your windshield. I have never seen bugs of quite this size. We had juice splatters so large that if they had been white instead of green and yellow you would have thought a swarm of pigeons had a pooping party on our truck.
We did see a family of deer and a buffalo. That was exciting for the split second they were visible before we drove past.

[This my friends is North Dakota. This is all you really need to know about the whole state.]

Harry Potter is interesting. I would highly recommend that if you are planning a long drive you get a book on tape. It makes it so your mind is occupied and you don’t have to talk to whomever you are traveling with. I have heard people talk about how they really like driving across the country. I mean, people actually do this for a vacation. I really love Miles but I think I ran out of things to talk about somewhere back in Idaho and now all the talking I do is joking about nothingness that we are driving though. We both get cranky when we travel so I really can’t see us ever doing this again. After the first night Miles said that if he could go back in time a month he would hire someone to make this trip for us. That was two days ago. I have no idea how he feels about it now but I am not thinking he feels any better about the trip…

I also have two more exciting signs for the day. Upon entering North Dakota the first city sign that you see if for “Home on the Range.” I kid you not. There is even a hill with these words written on it in large white letters that appear to be painted rocks.

[I don't know if you can read it but this is the Home on the Range sign]

The other sign that caught my interest was a sign for a city that read “[name of city]: with more than 40 friendly businesses.” I don’t know what happens if you are not a friendly business or why you would want to advertize that you have little more than 40 businesses in your city. Do you get to be a city at this point? How spread out are these businesses? It this really all there is to North Dakota? Please let this get more interesting.

After our adventure trying to find a hotel last night we decided to get a reservation for tonight. That worked out well. We are going to try this again for tomorrow. We did have a hard time getting the internet to work. We almost took the car off the trailer so we could drive to a Starbucks to get internet as we were so frustrated trying to get online. If you knew what a pain it was to get the car on and off the trailer you would really understand how frustrated we were and how far we will go to get internet...anything so we don’t have to talk to each other. We can sit on our respective computers typing away without a word.

Just kidding. Miles and I have actually had pretty good attitudes thoughout the last day days. It was a little touch and go last night but that was understandable. I think Miles enjoys all the jokes I make about the signs and my other observations that while funny at the time have not been important enough to have stuck in my head so I could really them to you now. *fingers crossed that I can keep him laughing for the next 4 days*