We were heading for Oakdale Wisconsin - an almost 700 km drive through Minnesota and most of Wisconsin. Each of the remaining 4 days of driving will take us through or close to a large, traffic filled city. Today it will be Minneapolis.
As we started out, we saw a roadside sign that just said "Smile." Although our visit to North Dakota had not given us much to smile about, the sign did make me smile on this day. Of course some of that may have been that were were finally putting North Dakota behind us.
We we a little fascinated by the strong presence of the Canadian Pacific Railway in North Dakota. Many of the roads we traveled on in this state had a main rail line running beside it and we saw a lot of trains. Many of them were either CP rail cars or engines. It makes sense that there would be some crop and grain transport between the norther states and the western provinces but we had no idea how much traffic there really was. We actually saw a CP Rail van travelling on the highway sporting North Dakota licence plates. Then, when we were still wondering about that we were passed by a transport carrying a CP Rail train engine.
Early into our journey that day we went through Fargo North Dakota. If you have ever watched the movie or the TV shows about that city, you would have the impression that Fargo is just a little town in the mid-west. Not so! Fargo is a large city that sprawls along the freeway for quite some distance and is, in fact, the largest city in the state based on a population of over 100,000.
We crossed into Minnesota just after leaving Fargo. This felt like progress!
The roads were, thankfully, very good, although the signs were snow and ice covered and sometimes unreadable. This continued for about the first hour that we traveled through the state.
Thankfully, as we continued to the south east, the evidence of snow disappeared and it actually got warm! Now some of that was certainly the sunshine in the cab with the windows done up, but we will take it! My feet were actually warm for the first time in days.
Minnesota started to show us her beautiful side, with it's many little lakes, rivers and ponds and the changing leaves in the trees,
As always, I was on the lookout for interesting road signs and, happily I was able to find some.
Some other interesting road side attractions were an alien looking water tower, some chainsaw art works and, my favourite, some playful cars that looked to be demonstrating what could go wrong jumping off a ramp.
We passed through Minneapolis without incident and, while the traffic was heavier than what we have seen so far in Minnesota, it was moving well We crossed the Mississippi River and then crossed the St, Croix River into Wisconsin. We were halfway through our day!
Road signs here told us there was a problem with tailgating on some of the roads.
With the worst of today's drive behind us, we started to relax a little and enjoy the drive. Wisconsin was showing her beautiful fall colours and this was one of the most scenic stretches of road we have seen so far on our return trip.
We arrived at our campground around 5:00 pm and it was a balmy 8 degrees Celsius! Warmth! The managers told us that they had turned off the water to the campsites, though because it was supposed to go down to -11C that night but they offered to fill our water tanks from a hose at the office. We told them we had lots and headed to our site. It was warm enough that we could open our door and vents for a little while that evening. It had been weeks since that was possible. We had dinner and a shower and reviewed our route for tomorrow. Today gave us hope that the rest of our trip would be smooth and trouble free.
No comments:
Post a Comment