The Dakotas

I told Josh a couple of days ago that it was his turn to write, but he hasn’t had the time yet, so I’ll have to do it.

We made it through Minneapolis, and didn’t even experience much traffic. We made it to North Dakota with plenty of time to spare. We took our time through Wisconsin, and thought about stopping in Wisconsin Dells because there are some very famous water/amusement parks there, but they were all too expensive. So we settled on stopping for frozen custard. Mmmm, frozen custard… It was not quite as good as Nielson’s in SLC, but still nice and creamy!

After delivering our load in Fargo, ND, we went to pick up a new load in Grandin, ND (about 20 miles north). Josh dropped the kids and me off at a park to play while he was loading. They had one of my favorite pieces of playground equipment, the merry-go-round! We had a lot of fun playing. I would even sit on the merry-go-round holding Lizzy, and Mitch would run around pushing us until we got going really fast, and then jump on. While we were at the park, Mitchell and I decided to play “Simon Says”. He was really good at it! I hadn’t ever really played it with him, but he must have played it with his friends or something, because I couldn’t ever trick him into doing something that Simon didn’t say to do. I was really impressed.

Right now we are in South Dakota (our 21st state) on our way to El Paso, Texas. We are hauling sunflower seeds. Last night we stayed the night in Mitchell, SD. Mitch thought that was pretty cool that there was a town with the same name as him. Mitchell (the town) is famous for a corn palace. The first corn palace was built there in 1892. The building is decorated entirely with corn, grasses and grains that are native to SD, both the outside and inside. Each year it is redecorated using a different theme. This year the theme was the rodeo. It was pretty cool.

Although Sturgis, SD is still over 100 miles away from where we are, we have seen hundreds of motorcycles, and every where we stop has signs that say, “Welcome Bikers”. Come to find out, the Sturgis Motorcycle rally is August 6-12. We are in South Dakota right in the middle of it! There are also hundreds of RV’s which I assume are so abundant for the same reason.

South Dakota has very bumpy roads. Everything that is not well secured falls down, usually on me! We had a box of leftover pizza in an overhead compartment, and on any other road, it would’ve been fine, but instead it fell out, and of course all the pizza fell on the floor of the truck.

We went through a cool rest stop the other day. It had a place to hike up to a scenic overlook, so we took a little hike. It was very refreshing to get some exercise in the middle of the trees.

As we were going through Illinois on our way to North Dakota, we stopped in Champaign and had dinner with a lady Josh knew from his mission. We found an Olive Garden (my favorite) that was near a place we could park, and we ate there. Sally drove about 45 miles to meet us there. It was really great for me to finally meet her after hearing so much about her. We hope to be able to go through his mission more in the future.

Pikeville, KY

Our last load was our worst so far. The load came through a broker instead of through Paschall, and they were not nearly as nice to haul for. They gave us horrible directions to get to the place in Sebewaing, Michigan to get our load, and we had to use mapquest to find it ourselves. Then after waiting 4 hours to get loaded we were finally off. We didn’t get loaded until 6 o’clock pm, and then they expected us to get to Pikeville, KY by 11 o’clock am the very next day. That was pretty much impossible. We got down to Pikeville by about 6 o’clock pm, after going about 50 miles out of our way because of poor directions. We had to go up in a canyon on some state roads that were very narrow and curvy. They hadn’t found another load for us by the time we unloaded, so we spent the night in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Pikeville.

The drive to Pikeville was through the mountains, and not on very big roads, so we were very surprised to find a lot of businesses there. There were several restaurants, both fast food and sit down, and many stores including Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and a couple of strip malls. There is even a college there.

We went to church in Pikeville. They had a fairly small branch there, and everyone was really nice to us. They were just disappointed that we were only passing through instead of moving in. There was one particularly nice couple that we talked to for about an hour after church named Jason and Brooke Cavanaugh. They even had kids the same age as ours. We exchanged phone numbers and addresses so if we ever go through there again we can give them a call and get together.

From Pikeville we went to Carrollton, KY. We picked up a load this morning from a company that makes plastic stuff that gets mixed with bottles and things to strengthen them. They were really strict on their safety policies and Josh had to wear a long sleeve shirt and pants along with a hard hat and safety glasses. The worst part was that they wouldn’t even let the kids and I inside the fence at all, so we had to wake Mitchell up at 5:30 am MST and go sit outside on a bench to wait for Josh to switch trailers. Josh had to watch a little video about safety and what to do in case of an emergency. If the sirens sounded, for instance, he was supposed to look at the windsock on the top of the building, walk crosswind, and then upwind to a safety point.

We are now hauling some sort of liquid up to Fargo, ND. It is weird to feel the truck rock every time we stop or start. Our route takes us right through Minneapolis, MN which we are not particularly excited about after the collapse of that bridge, but we will be going through a different part of the city, so hopefully it will be okay.