We left Minot around 9:30am. It was about 50 degrees, no wind, but very overcast. By the time we got several miles south of Minot we hit rain. It was intermittent and never very hard, but the roads were wet and Roger's clean truck and new RV got dirty :-/ Oh, well. It was bound to happen sooner or later.
We stopped for lunch just north of Bismarck, ND and it was raining and the temperature was 48 degrees. Needless to say we ate inside the RV. Once we turned west on I-94 it took about an hour before we encountered sunshine and this sculpture of flying geese (look closely and you may recognize the birds.)We arrived in Dickinson, SD around 2pm, having gained an hour. It was sunny and 72 degrees. YAY!!! It will get cold tonight, but we are used to big temperature swings from night to mid day living in the desert. We were beginning to think North Dakota doesn't have summer.
The terrain between Minot and Bismarck is just lovely. Rolling farmland and ranches with bright yellow flowers filling the fields. I saw one patch from a distance and remarked at how beautiful it was and as we drove further there were more and more fields of these flowers. Of course I had to google, "what crop in North Dakota has bright yellow flowers?" Rapeseed - think canola oil. I learn something new every day!
There was a huge coal mining operation near Underwood, ND. you could see the processing buildings and streams of water vapor pouring into the sky from a long way. The Falkirk Coal Mine is a major producer of coal - surface mining not deep shafts.
Roger commented on how the terrain and distant horizon reminded him of the movie "Dances With Wolves." We love having the horizon so far away and not being in tree tunnels! North Dakota is absolutely beautiful - at least this time of year. We've spent more time here than ever before and that we would have ever thought we would. I've learned it's not a wasteland but is full of rivers, lakes and ponds and farmland. You can just picture the bison on the hillsides as you drive. We crossed the Missouri River a few times and the Lewis and Clark Trail. (Now that could be a crazy trip - follow the LCT from St. Joe, MO to Astoria, OR. Hmmm...)
As for the new RV: We absolutely love the automatic leveling system! What a hassle saver. I didn't have to go into the RV with a level and guess how many legos go under which side and then hope I'm right. If I'm not, Rog has to pull off and we have to adjust a layer. It sometimes is pretty stressful at the end of a long driving day depending on how many times I make him pull forward and then back up as I adjust the legos and then still have the RV not really level and doors swing open or closed. Once I even put the legos under the wrong side. That was a fun day! So this will save time and stress and the doors on the fridge and bedroom won't swing!
The shower is wonderful. Just like a real one in a house. I even have a seat/ledge in it so I can shave my legs easily. And, having a full sized porcelain toilet instead of a small plastic one, is a nicety for sure.
We discovered another amenity/upgrade today. The screen doors on RVs have a slide on it to open and reach through to the latch that opens the door. Often this slider doesn't get closed behind us as we go out and bugs come in. Well, the new RV has a little gizmo that sits on top of the latch handle and you just depress it without opening the slider! This is a wonderful invention. Trust me, it's exciting!
We know that the suspension on this rig is different from the other - some special new system for RVs - and I didn't find any doors open or anything having fallen off the counters, or things fall out on me when I opened a cupboard door. It seems to have made a nice difference in how little things were disturbed inside. Rog says it made for a more drive too.
Maggie doesn't like the uncarpeted flooring in the living room. She keeps curling up under the table where there is carpet or gets on the furniture. I brought her outside rug in tonight in hopes she will use it. We will put the big red/gold rug back down when we winter but for traveling it is too cumbersome for taking up and down. We have used it in last two RVs to save the living room carpet from dirt. Now it'll be used for a different purpose - to make sure Maggs is a happy camper.
Roger took some time today to put some plexiglass over the bottom of the screen door BEFORE Maggie rips out the screen! Preventative move rather than a repair. You can't even tell it's on there - at least until the scratches show up. We had to go out yesterday for errands and had to take the dog with us because we were afraid we would come home and find our new door demolished. Now we can go out without her and have peace of mind knowing that if she gets agitated we won't come home to a disaster like we did in Pensacola.
We are staying in the North Park Campground in Dickinson, ND. It's a large park with long pull pull throughs and wide roads. No trees in the park except along the perimeter where they have a dog walk and one strip along the road behind us. One side of the park is next to a business area and the other side is open fields of someone's farm. It's quiet and I'm not seeing too many lights. It's filling up pretty fast this evening. When we got here it was quite empty but now all the sites on our row are filled.
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| The dog walk area across the road from our site. |
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| Happy Campers! |
Tomorrow we are going to Miles City, MT for one night. We will pass through the Teddy Roosevelt National Park at Medora, ND on the way. We stopped there and did the tourist bit on our first RV trip in 2005 in our first little travel trailer. It's a nice place to visit, but once you've seen it..... Obviously Teddy liked it because he visited often and had a ranch there.
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