Saturday, August 6, 2011

Travel: Minnesota to Montana: Day 1

We're in our hotel now, making patterns (well, getting ready to, at least...). Today was a leisurely adventure, full of pit-stops and exploration. I've heard many things about North Dakota, how it's flat, how there isn't much but a long stretch of land, and how I should be prepared to listen to quite a few audiobooks. I am not really sure who had such a weird, boring time when they were here, but so far it's really been an adventure!

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Victoria, Lindsay and Francesca, stopping for a tea, about three hours into the cross country trip

Victoria slept most of the morning in the back seat of the car as Francesca and I had long conversations about artwork, travel and tea. (No big surprise there)

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Luna Coffee

Luna Coffee in Fargo, North Dakota - right off 94 was our first big stop on our trip. It seems weird that we can't go a couple hours without being connected to the internet, really. Still, finding an oasis among the empty, gas-station specked landscape was a pleasant surprise. We all had a tea and stretched a little in Fargo, North Dakota.

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Our view from the coffee shop

I am sure there were other things in Fargo, but from where we sat, we didn't see a lot. The coffee place we stopped at was in a fun strip mall, though. Where you could get a coffee, some balloons, liquor, plastic surgery, and a insurance all in one strip. Good to know for future reference.

We got back on the road and traveled a couple hours to Jamestown.
We saw a huge plaster bull from the freeway and pulled in to Jamestown. Signs promised that we could see some live buffalo? What the heck, right? So we pulled over.

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What we found was an old timey paradise. Somehow we stumbled into a tiny recreation (maybe it was real at some point??) of a town in the days of olde! A little church, a dentist's office, the sheriff's, and a slew of other fun old buildings with life-sized dioramas inside were set up on a stretch that looked straight out of a western.

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Prolific western writer, Louis L'Amour, had a little shack there, which housed all one hundred and forty something books that he had written. I loved seeing all his titles behind plexiglass.

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I'm not sure if we fully realized just how big this fake buffalo was - especially because we had seen it from a mile away while we were on the freeway - but as soon as we walked past all of the old buildings and down the main drag, this huge sculpture of a massive, old buffalo appeared.

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It was leaky and old, but still was pretty fun to look at.

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All I could think about was how much fun someone probably had building this thing.

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It was getting darker and we still had about three hours of driving to get to our hotel for the night, so we said goodbye to quaint ole Jamestown and got back on the road.

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So far, so good. Can't wait to see what we find tomorrow!

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