I got back to good old, boring, Ohio last night.
Some initial cursory observations about my trip that I may or may not expand on depending on interest.
In no particular order:
1. North Dakota is worth going to despite the boring drive from Fargo to Bismarck. It is an even more boring drive than boring drives in Ohio and very, very flat. That being said, there are nice rolling hills past Bismarck.
Dickinson has an excellent dinosaur museum with fossils and lots of cool rocks from all over the world. The Japanese restaurant in town is actually pretty good and has an actual Japanese hibachi chef.
Medora is a nice little tourist town. I thought the Teddy Roosevelt National Park was prettier than the Badlands National Park in S.D.
2. I do not regret staying in the Deadwood/Sturgis area as opposed to Rapid City, despite it being harder to get to Mt. Rushmore. It was very picturesque and different than your usual motel off an interstate.
3. I highly recommend taking a tour. I would have never been able to handle the one-way tunnels of the Black Hills National Park or curves in Needles Park on my own, or known about some of the roads to take. And seeing the narrow rock formations in Needles is not to be missed. Custer State Park lodge has an excellent buffet.
4. I am very glad that I went to Omaha. In fact, I would be willing to fly out for a 4-day weekend to see more of it and take bus tour. I had no idea it was such a big city. I had the best meal of the trip there, and it wasn’t beef, since I don’t eat beef.
5. People in the small towns of Illinois are quite normal. They are actually more normal than the same sort of people in the same sort of places in Ohio, although there might be more Trump signs in Ohio. But the mask thing wasn’t as pronounced.
I had no idea Peoria was large enough to have an international airport.
Okay, I have to stop here. I’ve piddled too much of the day away on FR and have to unpack, get groceries, and do other stuff.
Sounds wonderful.
I swear.
Glad you had a good time and thanks for the update on the rest of your trip.
Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.
I’m glad you enjoyed your trip. It looks like you took advantage of just about every stop on the way, to take in what each location had to offer. That’s great.
Further trip reports. Again, in no particular order:
1) Wisconsin is very green, almost an Ireland type of green. And there really are a lot of cows. Drove in a diagonal from Lake Geneva to the MN line by the Twin Cities. Drove past Madison and Eau Claire, but too far away to see if they had a skyline. While Wisconsin has it all over NJ in terms of being much prettier, the cows in NJ make for better milk and the cows themselves are prettier.
I have never seen so many Culvers in my life as I did in Wisconsin. I hate Culvers.
Wisconsin is having a particularly hard time staffing their McDonalds.
2) Minnesota had the worst construction and detours (around the Twin Cities). I could not explore the countryside and did not see many of the lakes, but of the ponds, which perhaps they consider lakes in MN, that I could see from the interstate, surrounded as they were by a combination of marshy plants and sort of northern cypress-looking trees, they were quite pretty. The people seemed to be the least masked of any other place on the trip, although I was only in the small town parts.
There were more dead badgers on the side of MN than in any other state.
3) The outskirts of Fargo make the gas refinery areas of NJ look nice. Downtown Fargo has a surprisingly large number of coffee places and Lutheran churches.
4) Downtown Bismarck has a large number of 60’s bungalow homes and some very modest ones, though in good shape for the most part, right across from the capitol.
5) I was rather disappointed in Wall Drugs. I should have skipped that and gone to the Corn Palace instead.
6) Sioux Falls has a pretty park where their falls are, but the falls themselves are not that big. You can go over them without even really getting a shower out of it.
The city is laid out on a nice grid and had the most down to earth people of the whole trip, although the trendy shopping district street downtown had a few people with blue and pink hair and a new age shop. The one restaurant had really cheap wine. Overall the food was uniformly quite good.
Sioux Falls was the only place on the trip where the “free” breakfast at the hotel was an actual real regular breakfast of the type such places served pre ‘rona.
7) Iowa by far had the most intelligent road signs and road construction areas. Iowa didn’t mess around and barrel off huge sections of road where nothing was taking place. They were generous with their rest areas and signs telling you how many miles to go to the next city.
The capitol dome in Des Moines was very, very gold. It was much nicer than you would expect from Iowa.
I saw far less corn than I expected to. I saw more pheasants than I expected and a shocking dearth of cows.
Davenport’s river area is rather ugly.
Iowa had the worst food and for some reason they seem to be afraid of making real iced tea.
8) Everywhere you looked in Omaha a new huge building was going up.
Omaha has mean birds. They don’t like it when you park under their tree.
9) The traffic and construction in Indianapolis was almost as bad as in the Twin Cities. However, they did seem to have filled their many potholes since the last time I was there.
10) The most interesting store was in Aladdin, Wyoming, population 15 and proud of it. There are more horses than cows in Wyoming.
This Scooters Coffee chain seemed to be big in several states. I never got a chance to try it.
They are had in these states a chain of gas stations called, I kid you not, Kum and Go. I found that rather disturbing.
If you want to see elk, don’t go out west. Go to Pennsylvania.