The Midwest

Ironwood, MI to Bismark, ND - 541 miles, about 12 hours on the road.

Driving through four Midwest states in a day might be quite an accomplishment, except that literally, two minutes after getting on the road this morning in Ironwood, MI, the lady in the GPS said "Welcome to Wisconsin!"  So it's three states plus two minutes.

From Ironwood to Fargo, ND, was all two-lane road through almost completely deserted countryside.  I drove through three or four settlements not quite as big as Worcester (NY), about the same number that were a little bit bigger, but nothing as big as Oneonta.  It was a long time to be out of touch with where you were and where anyone else was.  Hardly any vehicles on the road.  Very gently rolling country, and the view was hemmed in by trees just about the whole way.  Yesterday and the first half of today, many of the place names were French.  

Toward the west side of Minnesota, it opened out some into meadows and some fields of corn.  Many lakes (and pickups towing boats) but more marshes, with six-foot-high marsh grass crowded from shore to shore.  I passed a really large lake called Leech Lake.  Now that's just wrong.

In eastern Minnesota, I crossed the Mississippi River.  It was about half the width of the Susquehanna River at Oneonta.  It's always a milestone on a trip west, or east, but this time I almost missed it.

The exception to rural isolation was, of course, the iron-ore shipping cities of Superior and Duluth.  I caught a glimpse of the end of the wedge-shaped western edge of Lake Superior, and crossed the St. Louis River, which flows between the two cities on its way to the Lake.  Lots and lots of railyard full of ore cars (anywhere else they'd be called coal cars), and big conveyor belts for loading the ore ships.  The whole time, I am embarrassed to say, I was humming "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

If you've been paying close attention to the map, and my proposed route, and today's route, you'll see that there's been a change.  I'll write more about the change in a later post, but the short version is that I've gone back to Interstates:  it's just too hard to drive two-lane roads in the middle of nowhere for 12 hours a day.  I've abandoned US Rt. 2, and there are other changes I'll go into later.

So spent the morning heading for Fargo, ND, because that was the closest place to pick up an east-west Interstate (94).  Then I spent much of the afternoon driving 75 mph (the speed limit) to Bismarck, which is a little west of center of the state, and also the capital. 

North Dakota is, really, indistinguishable from Kansas and Nebraska.  Sorry, but I've driven both a number of times, and there's nothing new up here north of them.  Some corn fields along the extreme eastern side, but mostly the short, brownish grass as far as you can see, with dirt ranch roads heading straight north and south as far as you can see.  And lots of exits marked "No Services."  And the temps were in the 90s today.  I passed a sign noting the Continental Divide, at about 1400'.  This startled me, because it had to be wrong.  I just looked it up, and it's correct - but it's not the Divide we always think about.  As I traveled east to west, I moved from the Hudson's Bay watershed to the watershed of the Gulf of Mexico.  I had spent just a few hours in the Hudson's Bay watershed (look it up - it's interesting), which is, I supposed, something.

So here I am in the capital of a conservative state which is named for both a battleship and a leader of a foreign country, both of which made their names in wars against us.  Go figure.