Friday, 30 July 2021
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| today's route |
From last night's campground I went back to Dickinson, thinking I'd do laundry there before hitting the road. But the laundromat I'd found online was closed because of major construction in the whole shopping center. I'd found another as backup, but by then I just wanted to get moving. I was running out of clean clothes but I figured I could deal with that problem later.
I spent the drive with mountains in the blue haze of the morning sun, cropfields, hills, occasional farm houses and outbuildings, some wind farms, cows, herds of horses, huge wheat fields and some other kind of grain, huge fields of sunflowers. It was all very picturesque.
I passed a sign saying, "Ask and the Gates May Open." That sounded weird to me (and a little Biblical - or maybe Field of Dreams) so I looked it up and found this article in the Bismarck paper about a program to allow hunters on private lands. https://bismarcktribune.com/ask-the-gates-may-open If North Dakota has 100,000 hunters out each year, I'm really glad I didn't come in the fall. Way too dangerous.
North Dakota has a town named New England, with a population of about 600. You can guess where the original inhabitants came from.
The "check engine" light was on all day - steadily until I came to a rough section of pavement break, at which point it started flashing off and on for a while, then it stopped again. I'm truly wondering what's wrong with my theory of a short in the connection.
I'd planned my route today so I'd pass by White Butte, North Dakota's highest point at 3,506'. I passed a road sign saying it was on my left, but they couldn't prove it by me. I didn't see a thing different from the other scenery, and certainly not a 3500' mountain. I was disappointed. On the other hand, the town of New England has an elevation of 2,592' so maybe I was looking straight at it and it just looked like another hill in comparison. And the town I was heading for - Bowman - has an elevation of 2,963'. Very different from closer-to-sea-level Dallas.
I came to the town of Amidon, "The Nation's Smallest County Seat." And that was true in 2000, when its 26 residents beat out Brewster, NE, with 29. All that changed with the 2010 census - Brewster dropped to 17 while Amidon only dropped to 20. These are both incorporated county seats. There are unincorporated ones that are smaller (in TX and SD) but they don't count of course.
Google hadn't been able to give me driving instructions to tonight's campground because it didn't seem to know it existed. Except the campground showed - and was labeled - clearly on Google's maps, but it refused to acknowledge this when I asked for directions. It was lucky I'd spent some time looking at those street-side maps because I could recognize the turn, even though it wasn't where Google had said.
This campground was another weird one. I pulled in and called the number on a sign that was leaning on the inside of a shed there. The nice woman said pick any spot and she'd text me credit card connection information. I told her I didn't receive texts (which was clearly not a concept she'd ever heard of) and agreed to pay cash instead. They had a drop box inside this same shed.
All the campsites with trees had already been taken by folks who were clearly long-term residents, so I found the flattest spot I could that also wasn't overgrown with grass and weeds. And it was okay. Hot because of no shade, but okay.
Here's the odd thing. Catty-cornered across the street was another much more attractive campground. Lots and lots of trees and they advertised clean showers (my place didn't have a bathroom, let alone a shower). But the tree place was electric hookups only while my place was full hookups. And that seemed to make a difference because that other place didn't have anybody at all staying there, while my place had maybe 8 tonight. Despite the weeds and unmowed grass and no trees. Full hookups aren't my thing, but I'd already paid my money when I found out, so I wasn't moving. I was just tired from the heat and several days in a row of driving.
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