One of my water exercise lady friends found a great cat sitter for me. Ms Jean is a retired school teacher who lives in town, has several pets herself and was up for the gig. She has lived here all her life and drives a Jeep. She told me not to worry at all if the weather should turn bad while I am away (which I'm sure it will some days); she's on it and has a lifetime of experience, plus that Jeep, that will get her out and about no matter what. OK then.
She told me that Smokey Rose has established a little routine when she arrives. Usually Kitty is on the bed. She immediately jumps up and goes and sits on the table (She doesn't do that for me. She mostly just opens her eyes, says, "oh it's you", and goes back to napping.) Ms Jean does her tasks with the food, water and litter box while Smokey Rose watches. Then SR goes and sits on the ottoman so that Ms Jean can sit in the armchair and start to pet her. And then everyone is happy.
The first time I had Ms Jean come in was right after Labor Day when it was still clearly summer, but all the tiny people would be back in school. I went north, up into western North Dakota. North Dakota is right next to South Dakota, but all the years I have lived HERE, I had never been THERE. Literally there never was a reason to go there. Still isn't, but I decided I really did need to at least set foot in the place, just to say that I had indeed been there. So I did.
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| I do like the city graphic design. I assumet his represents the river |
I started by going to the capital, Bismark which is in the south central part of the state, on the Missouri River. It's near the site of a place called Fort Mandan, overlooking the river. The Mandans were one of the tribes that lived around there. This is the place where the explorers, Lewis and Clark, spent their first winter.
I decided to go to Bismark at all for two reasons. One - a friend from my PhD program still lives there, but not for long. In October, she and her husband will be abandoning their home in the north, the place where they both grew up, for sunshine year round in Tucson Arizona. They are not going to be snowbirds, but permanent residents. Sounds like a good decision to me. And then two - according to the internet machine, there was a yarn shop in downtown Bismark, one of the few in the whole state.
Well, a few days before I was to leave, my classmate wrote to say she would not be in town. A family emergency was taking her away to Seattle. She didn't say what happened. Later I found out that no one had died, and no one was in an accident or sick or anything like that. But the point is, I would not be seeing her. I decided to go anyway because there was that yarn shop, always a good thing to explore.
Well, there was no yarn shop either. It went out of business a few years ago and was now a nice upscale home decor store. Darn!
As I was driving into downtown, I was able to move along ok, but I could see that something was up. All the traffic going out of downtown was backed up really far, and there were police of various sorts all over everywhere. I asked at the shop if that was just the usual rush hour there, but no, it's not. Turns out that the man who lives in the White House at the moment was in town.
He was out at a refinery in the area giving a forgettable speech about trade or something. That day he managed to keep it together and did not make any headlines for something or another stupid or outrageous. He just flew in and then out again right away, and hardly anyone actually saw him in person. Why he had to waste taxpayer money for this little jaunt, who knows?
Meanwhile people in town said that presidents come to Bismark for speeches all the time. Really? Why? Who knew? No one knows, but they do show up regularly for some reason. Presidents almost never come to South Dakota. (They are just memorialized in stone and bronze in SoDak.) Mr. Obama had to make a special trip towards the very end of his term to make a speech about career education at a technical college out in the eastern part of South Dakota, just to be able to say that he had, indeed, visited all of the states. Shows you how much we rate. But NORTH Dakota? What's up with that?
So anyway, I was in downtown Bismark with no possibility of yarn, so I asked about other things on my to-do list. Turns out there was a brewery right around the corner for the vanished yarn shop.
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| Inside the laughing Sun Brewery. Like all bars, it's pretty dark. |
I had skipped stopping for lunch, and I was a bit hungry. I was hoping for a late lunch but the brewery only served beer itself. There was an artisan pizzeria right next door which would deliver, but I didn't want a whole pizza. So I just had some beer in the late afternoon on an empty stomach. Turned out to be ok. I selected one that was pretty low ABW and then drank slowly. It was pretty good and refreshing. I would have liked a bit more but still had to do some driving to find the hotel, so I passed.
I asked the fellow sitting next to me if he was local and if he could give me driving directions using local streets to the hotel so I could avoid any freeway driving. He was local and he could and did give me some excellent directions. I wrote them down an a piece of paper ... as one does, you know, still.
I stayed at the new-ish Hampton Inn right by a freeway exit. That part of town was where all the national chain stores and restaurants were located. I ate at a national chain steak house. The hotel and restaurant were just fine, but really could have been anywhere.
So the next day I decided it was time to see what I could see that was unique to North Dakota. My picture album for the whole trip is here. So far the landscapes I was seeing were pretty much the same as what we have here in South Dakota. I like the prairie land, myself, but I was not seeing the difference between their prairie land and ours. Other than the fact that now I knew this for myself from having seen it myself, I was feeling like the first day was kind of a waste of time, gas, money and effort.
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| Sock Monkey sitting at the feet of some of the greats of history. |
I headed north of Bismark to the Missouri River and to begin exploring Lewis and Clark sites. I began at a state owned visitor center and museum, and then went a bit farther up to the site where Fort Mandan had been re-created. It was not the actual site, but fairly close by. they had a really good tour guide who explained a lot about what happened there. The guide used a theme of diplomacy and peacefulness of the expedition which was a very interesting take on things.
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| The guide said Lewis did include knitting needles in the gift bundles. But the men didn't knit, nor did the native women, so the needles were probably used as hair sticks. |
They had constant daily interaction with the local people, and did all kinds of things to help them out, like giving out medicine or helping with injuries, having the blacksmith repair and make iron tools (and weapons), and just hanging out together and doing what guys do when they hang out with other guys. The guide said they had so much interaction with the locals that they lied about Christmas. They told the people that Christmas was a special holiday in their culture that was intended to be spent in quiet reflection and prayer just so that they would get left alone for a couple of days. It worked. They had a very quiet Christmas celebration by themselves. And they were careful not to whoop it up during that time.
It was at Fort Mandan that they met up with the voyageur Charbonneau, whose wife was Sacagawea. She gave birth to her little baby boy, known as Pomp, there after a difficult labor that the Captains tried to help with. The family left with the expedition in the spring, and the rest, as they say, is history.
After Fort Mandan I checked out a couple of other sites which had been native towns. The natives in this region established more or less permanent settlements which were large enough to be called towns, not just encampments. They had both winter and summer towns, and the individual dwellings would have each lasted for several years and then been rebuilt on the same sites, hence the permanent rings in the ground today. The sites to be visited today are grassy places where you could see and feel the round sites where the native homes used to be located. First was a state owned place called Fort Clark, which did not have much except land and signs.
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| A re-creasted grass round home. These folks did not use teepees, except sometimes when they went out hunting, like camping today. |
Next was a unit of the National Park Service, Knife River Indian Villages Historic Site. Most of this land too, was grassy places with the indentations for the former dwellings, but they did have a re-created grass built round home with artifacts inside. That was interesting because you could actually see and feel how big the place was (or wasn't depending on your viewpoint!) and what things the people had and used in their daily life. Being a NPS unit, it had a very nice visitor center and museum, and had rangers on site and plenty of planned programs, especially for the local school kids.
After that it was time to head to the next hotel in the town of Dickinson. This place looked like a town that the railroads built. It has a small university, Dickinson State, and is the big shopping town (aka, there is a Walmart there) for a pretty large region. I stayed two nights at another Hampton Inn, and had to eat again at national chain restaurants. This was the biggest disappointment of the whole trip. I'm sure there must be some small locally owned restaurants in both Bismark and Dickinson, but I could not really find any names to try in guides or from the hotel staff.
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| the re-created commander's house and offices at Ft. Union |
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| Oil, oil everywhere! |
The ranger said she lived in nearby Williston. Now Williston has been famous, or infamous, in recent years because it is the city in the heart of the Bakken formation. For awhile it was a boom town with plenty of money floating around everywhere, but not near enough housing and facilities necessary for all the oil workers who flocked there for jobs. You might be interested in seeing the documentary film about Williston that was at Sundance a few years ago. I figured I was pretty close by, so why not go see it for myself.
I had lunch there at another chain fast food place, and drove around a little bit. There was a lot of construction going on with the roads. I found old downtown Williston which is not really being revived quite yet. Emphasis seems to be on building all new and shiny on what used to be the outskirts. There were a lot of new apartments complexes and outside of town (and in all the neighboring communities) camps with factory built homes which all looked new and fairly nice. I understand the boom is not on right now because of low prices for oil. It kind of looks like maybe they do have enough housing for workers, but I could be wrong.
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| Overlook at one of the South Unit entries |
Finally I headed south for the one place I really did want to see in North Dakota, The NPS site Theodore Roosevelt National Park. because I took the time to go out of the way to Williston, I thought I should skip the north unit. I could actually see a fair amount of it from the road, and it looked a lot like OUR Badlands in South Dakota. So I headed directly to the south unit and got there in time to be able to get into the visitor centers. Finally I took part of the drive through the scenic road where I passed several prairie dog towns and then had to sit and wait out a bison traffic jam.
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| The little critters do move fast so it's hard to get photos. |
The bison ... well, you just have to sit tight and let them have their way. They seemed indifferent to the cars, but I certainly would not be stupid enough to try to get them to actually notice me for some special reason.
I did not do the whole drive because I was getting tired at the end of the day so I decided just to head on "home" to my hotel. I was glad I had picked the nice clean, modern place in Dickinson, even though the city was about 30 minutes away from the park entrance. The tourist town of Medora, which is an historic western town, is the gateway city to the park and right on its edge, has what looks like little mom and pop motels. They might indeed be perfectly comfortable, but at my age now, I kind of like going with all the clean and predictable "mod cons" as opposed to "charm."
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| And now for some moments of Zen. |
Next day was just driving home. I was there in time for a late lunch, which shows you how close NoDak really is to where I live. Perhaps I should have made the effort to go at least to the Badlands up there sooner, but I've been there now, so it's good.
My overal impression? The landscape looked pretty much like the landscape down here. The towns were not as interesting as what we have here. Restaurants were disappointing. The Badlands were nice but smaller than ours. We have the Black Hills which are little mountains; they have no mountains of any kind. You have to go all the way to Fargo / Moorhead on the Minnesota border or way up north to Minot for yarn. We have more local breweries in SoDak. We have more national parks and monuments. We also have the Missouri River and Lewis and Clark sites, the same as they do. Presidents don't come here and gum up traffic. You don't have to use block heaters for your car in the winter. We have no oil wells and oil industry. Might as well stay home.
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