Saturday, 3 through Monday, 5 July 2021
I spent July 3rd catching up my blog posts, and spent the 4th and 5th planning my travel in North Dakota. I went through the material I'd picked up at the visitor center a few days ago and realized I didn't have time to see everything in ND I wanted. Instead, I picked out the things that I didn't want to leave the state without seeing and planned a route around those places. Then I was left trying to find places to stay.
North Dakota has a lot of state campgrounds, but it's got a lot of space, too, and there are whole areas of the state without a state park nearby. That wouldn't matter except the towns in these parts of the state are pretty small and don't seem to be geared for tourists. The most curious of those was Minot (pronounced my-not), which is the home of the annual state fair. They once had a KOA, but KOA no longer acknowledges it and as far as I can tell the whole campground is closed. And there are almost no other campgrounds in that area, so my choice was pretty limited.
I don't usually try to plan a whole month in advance - in fact, I don't think I've ever done it - but the combination of semi-post-COVID summertime competition for camping spaces and limited tourist facilities in ND has made me think that this time I'd do best by trying it this way. Plus, what with spending so much time here in Bismarck, I started worrying that I'd miss things I wanted to see. After several days of concentrated work, I've managed to find places to stay for most of the month, which is good. Now I'll just need to find enough time with an internet signal so I can plan driving routes with Google.
We've had a very wide range of weather over these last few days. At about 6:45 AM of the 3rd, we started getting constant thunder, very strong winds, and some really hard rain that lasted for several hours. I was very lucky in having already taken the dogs out at 3:40 and at 5:40, so they'd gotten in 2 decent walks when this happened and nobody needed to do bathroom kinds of things. I said the thunder was constant, and what I meant was that it kept on and on and on. I thought thunder was a response to a lightning strike, so it seemed to me it should be one report of thunder per strike. If that's what this was, then there must have been some major lightning event somewhere nearby that involved multiple lightning bolts over a period of time. Because this thunder didn't let up but kept rolling away for whole minutes at a time. In that sense, it was more like the noise from an airport or a highway than thunder.
That same day, after the rain stopped the temperature soared. The official high that day was 106°, which was the all-time high, beating the old record of 101° set back in 1881, pre-statehood. The next 2 days didn't make it up to that level, fortunately, but did hit the very high 90s. And these temps are why I've been postponing my visit to the state capitol and museum until the 6th, when the weather's supposed to be substantially cooler - with highs in the 70s instead.
I saw something at this KOA I haven't seen before: prominently displayed on the door to the office is a sign, in all capital letters, saying, "The display of any political divisiveness in this KOA is prohibited." I don't know if they were just being proactive or if there'd actually been an incident or two here. During the political campaigns last year, I saw several campers with displays, almost always for Trump, and wondered even then why I hadn't seen any controversy arising over them. So maybe there had been and I've just been missing it. Or maybe these folks just wanted to try to nip problems in the bud.
One of the other things I picked up at the visitor center was a brochure about North Dakota's agriculture, complete with photos and descriptions of crops. That huge field of yellow that I saw when I was driving north to Bismarck a few days ago may have been canola. They say ND is the #1 producer of canola in the US (86% of the US total) and that "the distinctive, bright yellow fields can be seen across the state." I've learned so much on this trip.
Speaking of which, at the dog park I met a woman who said her dog is trained as a support dog for people in trauma. She said they'd been down to Surfside FL for a bit and might go back, but she said conditions were really difficult down there. Because of all the displaced residents and hordes of media, housing was hard to come by; the Red Cross had found her a place to stay, but it wasn't exactly convenient and car rentals were almost impossible to find. She told me about some of the people - grownups and children both - who her dog had helped. It sounded like very difficult work to me, for both of them.
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