July 28 - Drive to Grand Forks, North Dakota with a stop at the Rugby Pioneer Museum.

Given that all our campsites on Route 2 so far had bordered on the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe railroad (BNSF to its friends), I was discouraged but not totally surprised that the Rough Rider RV park turned out to be within a half mile or so of the railroad. We were, as a result, awakened a couple of times during the night by the wailing of the klaxons as some train approached a crossing. Still it was an improvement on the trains roaring by right beside our trailer and we did get somewhat more sleep than the previous night, sleeping in until around 8. That meant we had breakfast and got on the road about 9:15, a fairly late start for us, but we thought we had plenty of time as we only planned to do around 200 miles to Grand Forks, North Dakota. Our "Starting Point" book listed a Volksmarch available there, so we wanted to stay overnight at a public park 20 miles west and do the walk as we drove through town the following morning.

As it turned out, we didn't have all that much time to spare, mainly because I got caught by a museum. We had found a monument that marked the geographical center of North America in Rugby, North Dakota, so of course we had to stop and take a picture of the truck there, and just down the street was a Pioneer Village Museum. From the outside it looked like a fairly extensive open air museum with some buildings from the pioneer days, so I just couldn't resist going in and seeing what all they had there. The entry fee was $5 apiece, but that really was minimal for the number and quality of buildings and displays.

The entrance hall was the first exhibit hall and had a wild miscellany of artifacts ranging from wedding dresses to phonographs, stuffed birds, and Native American crafts. In fact, the only common theme I could see is that all the stuff was old, at least by U.S. standards, where "old" is anything over 30 years back and certainly anything 50-100 years old. In Germany, of course, they called the apartment complex that Monika's family had lived in since 1930 a "Neubau" or "new construction", so their criterion for "old" was more like "ancient" by U.S. standards. The museum administrator played the Edison phonograph for us, the first time I have really heard one, and it was surprisingly loud and clear for an un-amplified sound coming from a needle grating on a wax cylinder.

After the entrance hall we walked along a boardwalk leading to an entire village of homes and shops from the pioneer era, all of which had a complete set of furniture and artifacts on display. In the middle of the boardwalk was a lawn area that had some railroad artifacts including an authentically equipped caboose. Not only that, we were allowed to walk through the caboose and even climb up to those little seats with the windows looking forward that were used to keep and eye on the condition of the cars of the train. The red emergency handle for stopping the train was also there in the middle, easily reachable by the observer for either the left or right hand side of the train. In reality it was, I suppose, a boring way to spend your life, but I still couldn't help longing to be in the caboose on the rails with a grand view of the U.S. rolling by outside my window for a day or two. Does anybody offer caboose rail tours in the U.S.?

I was also particularly interested in, of course, the blacksmith shop that was really a 1900 version of a machine shop. The old fashioned overhead drive with big leather belts was used to power everything from a sausage-stuffing machine to a lathe and a set of drill presses. The number of monkey wrenches on the wall fascinated me because I've just never seen so many of them in so many different sizes on display at once. There was also a version that had the handle and gear of the monkey wrench, but it had opposing "V" shaped jaws rather than serrated jaws. Was it used to grip pipe or for those old square nuts used on the big bolts? Some adjustable wrenches had curved handles that I had never seen before, and again I just didn't know why. So many puzzles, so few labels!

The one room school was a little gem with a complete set of tables and interior furnishings. They even had a model teacher in front dressed in period costume, and I wondered it my mother had looked anything like that when she taught in the one room school in Port Sanilac, Michigan around 1920 (see Wanderung 4). The huge coal burning stove had a kind of cast iron shield around it that was at least 6 feet high, and I could easily understand doing that so that the younger kids would not accidentally burn themselves on the hot surface of the stove. The danger of those old wood or coal stoves was clear, and I vividly remembered my mother's story of "The Day the School Burned Down" back when she was a child. After that notable incident Port Sanilac bought an acre from a corner of her grandfather's farm and built a solid new school building on that property which exists to this day (see Wanderung 4).

The danger of even getting to and from rural schools in the winter was brought home by a newspaper article in the schoolhouse where we read about 3 children whose horse had run off with their sleigh in a blizzard on the way home from school. The eldest girl froze to death before a rescue party could find them the next day. In so many ways, death was always possibly just around the corner for the pioneer folks, and so many folks died of what are now preventable diseases and at what we would now consider very premature ages. Although I admire the pioneers very much, I owe my life to modern medicine and have absolutely no desire to return to "the good old days" that others seem to pine for. Mark Twain's description of travel on the overland stage coach in "Roughing It" and the food they had to eat, for example, should cure any sane person of wanting to return to the old Wild West.

I also spent long minutes puzzling over the exact operation of the ice cream machine out in front of a creamery building, and I must say more labels or pictures of things in use would have been very helpful. Still, it was fun to try to imagine how it ran and how people had operated it in the old days. Seeing the old glass milk bottles and a large machine with two output bowls that I think was a cream separator were also quite interesting. Other shops included a grocery store, bank, and even a saloon! All had a complete complement of items in stock, so you could imagine walzing in and buying something around 1900, just as the pioneers must have done.

The pioneer houses in the collection of buildings ranged from a rudimentary log cabin that housed a family of 2 adults and 9 children (!), to a nice two story house with kitchen and living room downstairs and bedrooms upstairs. One that amused me was a typical Norwegian settler's house because I really didn't think they had their own distinct type of house on the Dakota frontier, and one that puzzled me was a "German immigrants from Russia" house. Now that's getting doggone specific! But in fact there is an entire society devoted to Germans who had first emigrated to Russia starting in the early 1800s and then emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1800s. Perhaps I should not have been surprised because Monika's family on her mother's side had emigrated to Riga, Lithuania, around 1850 and on to Minsk, Russia (now in Belarus) around 1910. But the extent of German emigration into Russia indicated by a map display still astonished me because there were German populations apparently as far off as the middle of Siberia! Who knew?

Monika was, by this time, making pointed comments about the lack of any lunch and the time being after 1 p.m. As usual, I was too interested in everything we were seeing to feel hunger, something that also has routinely happened to me on long cross-country flights in my Cessna. so I know it is some byproduct of intense cognition. But heeding the marital distress signals I hustled through the last few exhibition halls of antique cars, tractors, threshing machines, and miscellaneous farm equipment, just taking pictures of the very best or oldest examples of each one as we walked by. Even though I short-circuited the final display halls, we still spent about 3 hours all told in the museum.

The museum manager recommended the Cornerstone Cafe just back down the street, and that is where we had a very nice lunch of roast beef, baked potato, and salad for $3.99! With drinks and tip the total came to $12 (including tip), but that was just, as Monika so pithily put it, "dirt cheap" for that kind of meal. The waitress and cashier also seemed genuinely friendly even though we were strangers, and we noticed they employed a young man with Down's Syndrome as a busboy. It's the kind of place that we would always patronize if we could be sure of finding a place like that in these small towns.

From Rugby we continued east through very flat and remarkably wet countryside. The number of small ponds and lakes on the farms beside Route 2 astonished us. I had somehow thought of North Dakota as more of a grassland state, but that part of it closely resembled the swathes of Minnesota and southern Wisconsin croplands we had seen at the beginning of the trip. Although we still occasionally saw wheat and hay, the variety of crops increased to include corn, soybeans, potatoes, and a yellow flowering crop that we think was canola. However, once we saw a purple flowering crop that looked completely out of place and completely stumped us; it might have been lavender but why anyone up in North Dakota would be growing lavender I had no idea.

We continued our drive east on a mostly empty road, enjoying the passing farm scenes. We both felt that this Route 2 was a great way to have a relaxed drive across North America and decided we would take it again if the occasion arose. As we neared Grand Forks we turned off to the Turtle River State Park, paid our fee, and picked out a campsite close enough to a water tap that we could fill our fresh water tank without moving the trailer.

There was a bit of time before our normal suppertime and we hadn't had good exercise for a couple of days, so we grabbed the bikes off the truck and rode around the park. I had seen a sign for an official cross-country bicycle trail, and we decided to give that a whirl. That was our first experience actually using the bikes off road, and it was a challenge for both of us. Monika shrieked a couple of times but didn't actually fall or crash, which was good, and I was surprised by my bike doing a wheelie when I pushed it hard up a hill in its lowest gear. I ran off the trail--it's hard to steer with the front wheel in the air--but also did not crash so we were both all right. After an hour or so we felt we had earned our dinner and rode back to the campsite for the rest of the evening.

While we both worked on the computers after dinner I turned on the radio and found a Minnesota Public Radio station that featured beautiful classical music. It was a perfect way to relax in the evening while I wrote the journal and Monika processed and selected pictures. The strains of Wagner (Tannhaeuser overture), Beethoven (Fidelio quartet), Mahler (symphony), and Elgar (tone poem), among others, drifted out the windows of the trailer while we pecked away at our keyboards. I cannot imagine a nicer way to end a day anywhere, anytime, and we were in a perfectly relaxed mood when bedtime rolled around. I was, of course, fervently hoping that the BNSF was far enough from us that I would not get midnight greetings from Daddy Klaxon, and so it turned out. Unfortunately, some kind of intestinal virus struck me during the night, so I had to wake up and make several hurried trips to the bathroom. That was a shame because we finally had an absolutely quiet campsite where the only sound was the rustling of the wind in the trees and I could have really used a good night's sleep! It was nice and restful in the bathroom, though.