Dorth Nakota

Two mornings ago we woke up in the city park just outside Fergus Falls with shortcuts on the mind. The Adventure Cycling route we usually follow is very good, but sometimes a pruning is called for. We took a quiet highway out of town. A lot of roads we travel are like this one. Supplanted by the interstate, only occasional local and commercial traffic rumble by. We saw a "Road Closed" sign up ahead, but how closed exactly? When we got there there was an enormous trench where the road once was. No good for a car but no big deal for a bicyclist and we looped around on the shoulder to continue.

Our first break of the day was at a picnic spot right next to an enormous sculpture of a prairie chicken. The chicken must have given us his blessing because on our next stretch we were absolutely flying. The tailwind rocketed us into Barnesville for lunch at a place called the Purple Goose. In the bathroom they had a poster about life lessons we can learn from geese. Their pizza was very good, but sat a little heavy as we trundled off for our last stretch of the day. The wind was not quite so generous for this stretch but still we pedaled past miles of farm land without too much trouble and arrived at our destination: Moorhead, Minnesota.

The last few days had felt a bit "strictly business" so we splurged and stayed in luxury at a Super8 motel. The shortcut had worked like a dream and we had lopped off more than 20 miles.

When we departed the motel this morning a woman in the parking lot told us it would be 105 today. It certainly was nowhere near that during our first miles as we rode through a haze that we tried to convince ourselves was fog instead of smoke from distant fires. After a little bone shaking on a gravel road, we were in North Dakota.

At a mid-day stop we found the small town of Kindred, population approximately 700. They were having a "Kindred Days" celebration that featured little kids riding a train whose cars were made out of plastic drums, the fire department letting children blast their fire hoses, crafts and vendors, and even the NRA had a booth to complete the wholesome scene. The barbeque was only serving hamburgers and hot dogs so we pressed on for something else to eat.

For the last thirty miles or so we rode one long, straight road. We stopped at a church and a very friendly man allowed us to fill our water bottles, with ice too! We chatted for a minute and I told him we were riding home to California. "Oh, there's lots of fires going on over there." "Yeah, it seems like the whole state is on fire." "Yes, when the rapture comes the whole world will be on fire." Right... I gathered up our bottles and we cycled onward, ever onward.

Our final miles featured a few gentle rolling hills, sunflower fields, and some winds that didn't help us but weren't directly on the nose either. We're camping tonight in a city park in Enderlin. Tomorrow offers a long stretch of limited services so we'll stock up with food and water toward our hopeful destination of a tiny town called Gackle.

The trench

For scale

We thank him for his blessing

The haze

This is a sunflower field

Next to the Maple River in Enderlin, ND