Wanderung 6

Pursuing Pioneer Pathways from the Potomac to the Pacific

June-August 2004

June 15 - Drive to Valley City, North Dakota

Taking care to install the new anti-sway bar and hook everything else up properly, we left the campground shortly after 9 o'clock and headed pretty much due west on I-94 past Moorhead and Fargo to Valley City, North Dakota. We finally entered the Great Plains type of ecology where we could see from horizon to horizon and the trees were few and far between. We had to get used to these unending vistas again; it's just a very different type of scenery compared to the hills and forests of the East where we live. As we drove along the clouds became darker and it began one of those all day type of rains from a dark gray stratus layer of clouds. We stopped off at a small Information Center along the way and found a free Internet kiosk there. I was happy to check our email, but the fly in this ointment was that you had to keep pressing some key every 20 seconds or so or else it would automatically log you out and go back to its home page. What a nuisance, but the price was right!

Although our goal for the day was the Army Corps of Engineers campground at Lake Ashtabula, north of the town of Valley City, and was only around a hundred miles, we were driving for almost three hours. In part I suspect that was because I was driving no faster than 60 mph, but I felt like it still should have been more like a 90 minute drive and couldn't figure out what part of the time-distance-velocity equation I was getting wrong. Still, we found a nice vacant campsite (# 5) when we arrived and since it was raining steadily, we just backed in the trailer and then went inside so that Monika could cook a nice lunch. The rain trailed off while we were eating and that made it much more pleasant to subsequently unhitch the trailer, sign up for two nights, and visit the bathrooms. Like our previous Corps of Engineers campground, these bathrooms were modern and absolutely pristine clean, and we didn't even have to pay for hot showers at this campground! Ah, how simple things can give you bliss. I think it's very important to enjoy small things, and although many middle class folks would take nice bathrooms and showers for granted I don't think anyone who has camped extensively does so.

Our campground was right alongside the lakeshore and even boasted a small swimming beach that looked like it would be nice in hot weather. Since the temperatures were only in the 60s and it was still cloudy, we weren't really tempted to go for a swim but the pelicans out on the lake were relaxing to look at. Since they are big and white and paddle on the water, we thought at first they might be swans but the really long narrow beak finally made us think of pelicans. I honestly didn't know North Dakota had pelicans, but when I stopped to think about it there was no reason they shouldn't be up here as long as the Corps of Engineers so nicely provided lake habitat for them.


 

The sky gradually cleared into a deep azure blue in the late afternoon. That happened too late to drive into town for the Volksmarch, but we took showers and walked around the campground a bit and wrote photo-letters to our kith and kin before a light supper of soup and crackers. A "photo-letter" is a letter written on the back of a page full of photographs taken on the trip. Monika enjoys selecting a thematic set of 4 to 6 photographs that she arranges into a page with the computer software and then prints. Then we use the backside of these prints to write the letters to our friends and relatives. We hope the combination gives them some idea of what we're up to on a Wanderung, and certainly we enjoy doing it. Since our travel is strategically arranged but tactically opportunistic and a bit unpredictable, we don't really expect letters back but we can always hope for some email responses.

After supper I finished reading Kipling's "Kim" on Baby while Monika played the lap dulcimer on the table. Cuddling up with a computer to read a book was a bit different, I found, but feasible. Instead of lying on a bed holding the book up, I laid on the couch with my back propped up and perched the computer on my lap. Since Baby was so small and light, it worked out pretty well and even kept my lap warm. There are no real pages in the electronic text, so I found I was reading whole chapters rather than stopping in the middle so that I could use the chapter headings to find my place again. Instead of turning pages, I was using the "page down" key, simply pressing it whenever I reached the bottom of the screen. After decades of reading paper books I admit it felt a bit odd, but certainly it worked for me and "Kim" was a great book. I was fascinated how well Laurie King had used Kipling's character Kim as well as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes character in the book "The Game" that Monika and I had just read. Amazing, really, to be able to do that so well.

After I finished "Kim", Monika was switching over to crocheting for a while so I took out the tenor recorder and started practicing. Since I had only started a month ago and was very much still learning, I was a little sensitive about playing where other folks would hear all the mistakes and digressions. Monika took that in good humor, however, and we played the "Guess That Tune!" game. That's the game where I tried to play a familiar tune like a folk song well enough for her to recognize it. If she guessed the correct tune on the first try, then I got a point. If she couldn't guess or had to think really, really hard about what tune it was, then I lost a point. I ended up the evening with 5 wins and 1 loss, not that I was keeping score or anything.

But in any event we now have literature, in the form of e-books, and music, in the form of amateur recitals, to entertain us of an evening. I started thinking about bringing a set of paints and an easel with on the next trip, because then we could round out our activities with amateur art as well as literature and music. That was my personal idea of nirvana, admittedly somewhat different from the NRA's. To some extent the photography, at least when we did it well, (arguably) approached art, but it did not quite have the same creative edge or impact as a good painting. Often when I took a picture of a glorious sunset or a beautiful flower I would think about painting the same scene in order to better communicate how I felt about it at the moment. A photograph records reality quite well but does not typically convey the emotional experience very well, and I wanted to do that. I really do not understand how other folks have time to watch TV. We had the capability to do so on this trip, but we found ourselves almost never connecting it and turning it on because we had so many other things to do. We also weren't attracted to most commercial TV fare as it just didn't seem very interesting. Part of the problem might be that folks like us are a bad demographic segment for TV programming and advertising because we don't rush out and buy everything put before us on the TV screen, but rather think about whether we need something and can afford it. (Hah! Remember the impulse purchase of my bicycle the day we left on this trip? I just realized I was slipping into Old Codger Talk; you know, the stories that start out, "Back in my day..." and are just filled with self-serving distortions of how virtuous/rational/right the Old Codger is and how sinful/stupid/wrong the younger generation is.) Ahem. Be that as it may, we preferred to read a good book in the late evening, in this case Elizabeth Peters' "Guardian of the Horizon" a fanciful tale of a remarkable family of Egyptologists circa 1907. Hard to put down, really, but we finally got to sleep around ten.

Copyright 2004 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
Prolog Map Epilog
June 2004
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July 2004
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August 2004
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