June 13 - Fargo, North Dakota - Walk

Our plan was to leave early and beat the traffic when we drove through St. Cloud, and it almost worked. In fact, we had breakfast, packed, hitched the trailer, dumped the tanks, and were on the road by 8:45 and had zipped through St. Cloud with almost no traffic by about 9:30. As we headed for I-94 on the other side of town I thought we were home free, but suddenly I remembered the sway bar. More accurately, I remembered that I had not installed the sway bar before we left, so we pulled over and sure enough the sway bar was not there. I asked Monika about it and she said she had taken it from the truck and laid it on top of the propane tanks where I obviously had overlooked it in the hustle and bustle of hitching everything while being buzzed by the usual gang of mosquitoes. So we backtracked all the way to the campground, asked if anyone had found it there (nope), and then slowly retraced our route back out of town while scanning both sides of the road for the missing sway bar. Unfortunately we never spotted it, and I expect some enterprising person saw it and figured "finders keepers". The campground had a "reminder" billboard just as you drove out of the campground. It included things like "Is the antenna down? Are the steps up? Etc" but unfortunately not "Did you hook up your anti-sway bar".

Since this was Sunday and most RV places were closed, we just had to keep on trucking without it, which irritated me. Fortunately the trailer still was fairly stable when the semis passed us or when the crosswinds became gusty, so although I had to be more careful than usual and keep the speeds down, the rig never got out of control. Nevertheless, by the time we worked our way to Moorhead, MN and found a campsite at the Buffalo River State Park around 2 p.m. I was exhausted and just flopped down for a nap. Still, after an hour I was back up and ready to tackle the Volksmarch in Fargo, North Dakota, which is just across the Red River from Moorhead.

We drove over to the starting point and found that the Quality Inn had been replaced by a Howard Johnsons, but fortunately they still had the Volksmarch box and we could sign up for the walk without any problems. The Fargo walk was a large irregular triangle first to the north and west, then to the east, and finally returning south and east to the hotel. Most of the walk was through neighborhoods that for me typify the Midwest, or at least the Midwest as I remember it. The homes were small but well kept, children rode bicycles on the sidewalks, and we even passed a child-operated street corner stand selling lemonade for 5 cents a glass. I was also struck by another memory from my childhood--huge complexly branched trees on many of the side streets that were so large on top that they formed an arched bower completely across the street, almost like the nave of some forest cathedral. I finally figured out that these were classic elm trees and that surprised me as I had thought that the Dutch Elm disease had totally wiped them out. I honestly didn't think there were still towns with mature elm trees like this, but Fargo certainly had them.

This walk was billed as a "campus" walk, and the northernmost section wound through the University of North Dakota at Fargo university campus. The flowers were all just blooming when we walked through and I thought it was a pretty campus with several very nice older buildings. The nice brick and masonry designs on those turn-of-the-last-century buildings seemed to me to have more character than most of the new buildings with their rather plain lines and angles, but that's just my opinion. The campus even boasted a huge covered football stadium on its northern edge, and I was rather curious as to how much money that had cost and whose ox had been gored to fund it.

After heading east past a park where I checked my feet--I was breaking in my new pair of New Balance 975 hiking boots--we curled back south past a golf course and more nice neighborhoods to get back to our truck. Although the campus is basically the only high point of the walk, I enjoyed walking in Fargo on a Sunday afternoon just to relive the type of middle-America town ambience that characterized my childhood. I expect my old home town is nothing like that nowadays, but it is reassuring to know that some such places still exist and children still play happily in them and sell lemonade on street corners.

After the walk we returned to our campground and after some sandwiches for dinner settled in for the night. When we turned to drive into the campground, Monika spotted a deer alongside the road and warned me in time. I slowed down as the deer came bounding out of the woods. But the deer stopped at the side of the road and like a well-trained pedestrian looked to the left. Seeing the truck, it decided to turn around and bounded back into the underbrush. We both laughed and decided that this deer will not, like many of the others we have seen, end up as road kill! We counted as many as 10 deer carcasses alongside the road for a day's drive during the first part of the trip.

Terry called while we were driving back and Monika chatted with him for a while as I drove, and later that evening Judson called to tell us how they were getting along with their new house. I was happy to hear that the wall where they wanted a new doorway was a non-supporting wall, which made the whole job a lot easier and cheaper. Actually, I was sorry I wasn't there to try my hand at some modest demolition, but I'm sure my son was happier that I didn't try something of the sort. We also touched base with Martin later in the evening and found out he had been in some kind of TV commercial via the acting studio, so now we have a reason to watch commercial TV if we can ever find the time for it. Reassured that the family was OK, we could turn in for the night in good humor.