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.