This was pretty much going to be a travel day, but we did find a few surprises. The day began at 8:20 AM and 73 degrees under fair skies, although by the end of the day it did reach 97 degrees. Yes, 97 degrees in the northern part of North Dakota. I don't think it was that warm in Florida today.

The word for the day is FLAT. The land was so flat it was big sky country, even though we were in North Dakota not Montana. We could see for miles and miles in every direction. And we drove for miles and miles through fertile farm land and then into the prairie. The crops were more of the same, corn, soy beans, wheat and hay, and occasionally, sunflowers, but the farms seemed bigger. They just seemed to go on forever with little to break up the monotony except the occasional banks of silos and a few farmhouses.  

Before noon we arrived in Bismarck with intentions to visit the capitol complex. But we decided to make a stop first, at Best Buy. My old camera just was not up to the task anymore, with only 7.1 mega pixels and 3.8 optical zoom, it was time to upgrade to something with more beef. I bought a new Sony with 20 MP and a 40X zoom. It has wifi and burst mode and a lot of things it will take me time to learn, but I am excited about getting up to speed with it. Of course it was not in service today since it needed to be charged.

We then headed to the capitol, and an interesting one it is. As you will see in the photos, it looks more like an office building than a state capitol building, but we cannot say enough about the campus, which is immaculately groomed with thick green grass and mature shade trees. After taking photos, we decided to hang out there for lunch. And while we did, we saw two wedding parties going in and out of the building and wandering around the grounds and having photos taken. It is Saturday, but I am not sure why they were on the capitol grounds. I wondered if perhaps the governor had performed the ceremony. We will never know. But it was entertainment for the lunch break.

As we proceeded west, the topography began to change to rolling hills and the elevation increased. And the crops became mostly one crop all the way to the border…grass. This area farms grass…green grass, yellow grass, and who knows what. The fields were filled with freshly cut grass and huge round bales of hay drying in the sun. And the farmers were out manning their fields, cutting and baling all along the highway. I don’t know who is eating all of this hay, because we rarely saw any cows, and when we did, they were few and far between. These fields of yellow and green were broken only by the long stretch of highway as it weaved its way west over hill and dale, ever reaching for the horizon.

On the western side of North Dakota we decided to take a break from the path we were on and meander down a country road…the Enchanted Highway…for a few miles where we saw these incredible metal sculptures. The first was Geese in Flight, followed by Deer Crossing, and several others. I found the grasshoppers to be the best of those we saw. See the photos.

We were now into prairie lands, where treeless rolling hills are dotted with patches of silver sage. The only trees to adorn the landscape were to be found in low lying areas where the water ran through it. And sharing the land with the cows and the grass we began to see those black hammers pounding up and down in their perfectly timed cadence, like a slow romantic waltz…oil wells. There’s oil in western North Dakota and it is bringing prosperity to what used to be a sparsely populated area.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, there it was. The Painted Canyon…the bad lands of North Dakota, a preservation of Theodore Roosevelt’s, in a park named after him. My photos do not do justice to the beauty that is the bad lands. The topography is complex in its beauty, with mounds that look like hills of dried mud hollowed by the erosion of years of water running down the sides, and dressed by soft green grass at their base. The hills are formed of many horizontal striations of color, tan stripes, beige stripes, white stripes, and dusted with pink rock called clinkers, colored and crushed by the heat of underground fires sparked by lightning and grass fires. When I look I see ice cream sundaes with vanilla and chocolate and pistachio ice cream topped with strawberry sauce.   Bad lands???? I think not!!! And as suddenly as they appeared, they were gone. And we returned to sage-peppered rolling hills with occasional mesas peeking up out of the prairie floor and surrounded by yellow grass.

We arrived in Glendive around 4 PM and after a brief tour of this small town, we settled in for the night. Tomorrow, Shelby, MT.