August-September 2021
The B-B-B B Town Tour
aka, The Road to Bimidji, or... Back in the Bighorns
So what’s with this title you say? Well, we noticed that our maps seemed to show an inordinate number of towns starting with the letter “B” in these northern areas. First, in North Dakota there’s Bismark, of course, which is the capital. But our map showed a total of 47 B-Towns in ND; and then looking ahead, an astonishing 125 or so in Minnesota (there were only 24 B towns in WY). Who knew? We pondered that for a (very) few seconds, wondering why so many; some Scandinavian language thing or what? Never found an answer. Didn’t actually try all that hard. Thought it made a catchy title though.
We begin our tale in early August, in Wyoming, in the Bighorn mountains. We’d been scrambling around in Colorado and Wyoming for the months of June and July, going from hither to yon and back, and had just arrived in the Bighorn mountains in Wyoming, where we intended to not move a muscle for at least a month. Weren’t completely able to keep that pledge, but we made a good stab at it. We spent a goodly amount of time moving around between campsites we’d enjoyed last year, combined with exploring some new areas and enjoying them as well. Some times we moved just to get out of the smoke a bit. We would have clear skies for awhile, then the wind would change, or a new big fire would break out somewhere. And we’d pick ourselves up and look for a better spot.
The smoke problem was noticeably worse this year than last, perhaps due to the presence of a local fire burning in the northern Bighorns, but we had some luck with the occasional rainy session. Lots of thunder and lightening, then it would come down off and on for a couple of days, then it would be sparkly and clear when it all got finished. But after a few days the smoke would return. These two photos were taken from roughly the same spot about a week apart; you can see the difference. We were able to stay around to experience the area in both clear and smoky times, but we felt badly for families out on their long anticipated western trip if all they saw of the Bighorns was a drive through on what happened to be a smoke filled day.
We headquartered for awhile out of Buffalo, a town we like a lot. There was a truck selling fresh corn, always a treat, and our favorite little grocery store sells some pretty nice scones. Last year we would run into town once a week to grab internet from the local library. But now we’ve switched to Verizon (in case you cared) from T-Mobile (notoriously bad in the Mountain States), and we’ve also located a bluff high above Buffalo that has an amazingly good connection. So we hang out up there, about 10 miles out of town and a couple of thousand feet higher in elevation. It runs 8-10 degrees cooler up there than down in town so we can hang out a couple of days to catch up with online projects before moving on deeper into the mountains.
We like it up here on this bluff. The views of the mountains are great, it’s a wide-open meadow with good hiking in the area, the cows are friendly, and there are horses over the fence who are always ready for a scratch. Also, if friends are coming through, it’s easy for them to find us here.
And we have, indeed, had a bit of company. Mabelle, from California, came through and dropped off a map she’d borrowed. And our new Swiss friends, Stephan and Annette, whom we had met down in Colorado, stopped off moving north; we had a lovely morning looking at maps together and helping them plan some of their next few months. They hope to ship to South America before too much longer, but in the meantime are putting their time to good use as they explore the United States.
Some less than great things have also occurred, although nothing to cause too many problems. We finished up spending several days in the forest, at a spot we’d titled The Best of the Best last year — but not quite so good this time through. Starting up to leave, we found the engine was quite grumpy and, in fact, not happy at all. It seems the squirrels (?)(chipmunks would never do such a rude thing!) had set up housekeeping in the engine area, and had chewed up some wiring. Rick was able to repair one of them, but others were less accessible.
We limped into the town of Sheridan, about an hour north of Buffalo. Staying waaaay over in the right lane and using our best Queen Elizabeth royal wave, we managed not to get clobbered by the trucks flying past (some tech clarification for those who care - we could maintain highway speed ok, but the turbo was not working so we couldn’t pass anyone). The Chevy dealer didn’t seem to take much interest in our problem; said they could fit us in next week (!), but the GM dealer in town took very good care of us, and had us on our way by lunchtime. They also suggested a product they thought worked better than the Irish Spring soap (very smelly) we’d been putting under the hood for the last several years. We are keeping our fingers crossed that this is the last time we have to deal with that issue! Hope springs eternal here at Team Tortuga.
But, you know, we like Sheridan too. Rick has a chiropractor there (we have them spread out all over the country by now) and took advantage of the situation to see him a few times and get his back better under control. Sheridan is a bigger town than Buffalo, so we were able to get some other things taken care of as well. Heavy rains had led to a roof leak, and the solar guy we’d found last year was able to take care of that for us.
Being here in the Bighorns is, for us, like being on vacation. We stay in one campsite until we run out of food, then bop down to town for victuals, then back up the hill. We get caught up on projects, and plan for where we’re going next and just generally enjoy some days off. Since it’s too hot everywhere else within a couple hundred miles, where would we go if we left?
As it turns out, we ran out of projects before we ran out of time here. We’d put together some plans to get together with a buddy who would be coming through this area early in September, and we were going to meet him in close-enough Casper, a hundred or so miles south. Before heading there, we decided to explore some areas of the Bighorns we’d not seen much of before. So we poked around further north, going up a beautiful canyon that goes north out of Dayton. It was very nice; you drive up a lovely, narrow canyon, following the Tongue River. We hung out there for a few days, enjoying the river (lots of fishing, for those interested in such things) and the view of the sun on the rock outcroppings was super. Quite nice.
Dayton is at the northern edge of the mountains, and from there we started a several days drive south down through the middle of the Bighorn Wilderness. Leaving Hwy 14, we continued along an unpaved road through the national forest along the west side of the range, finding a nice secluded spot for each night and then moving further south in the morning. We had a brief moose sighting one evening, and in another spot found interesting rocks scattered across the hill side where they’d been left behind by a glacier 10,000 years ago.
The southwest part of this range has different topography altogether. Here the road is marked as the Alkali Country Byway. It drops in elevation, gets much drier and moves from mountain greens to desert tans and oranges seemingly just like that. There are some stunning rock ridges and outcroppings that we really enjoyed. Parked up for the night down here, we enjoyed the sunset on the rocks, then drove through Hyattville the next day, and on around to Ten Sleep, where Dirty Annie’s ice cream is still pretty darn good. Our only mistake was we didn’t get organized about a petroglyphs area that we could have explored had we gotten the proper information ahead of time. Oh well, another year.
After a few more days in the mountains, we started out for Casper to meet our buddy and boy did we every mess up! We screwed up the truck and it quit on us along I-25. An unfortunate first for our steady friend, sitting dead in the water (actually, dead on the highway). OK, let’s be straight here — Rick messed up and drove on the highway without realizing the truck was in four-wheel drive. The Tiger didn’t break, driver stupidity broke the Tiger. Do Not Do This At Home. With all the alarm buzzers and warning lights a modern vehicle has you’d think there’d be one for this problem too. But no. Just an increasing smell we didn’t recognize, an increasing whine we couldn’t identify, and finally more noise - more smell - a cloud of smoke from under the hood - and we pull over and stop. Ouch!
After waiting several hours for a tow truck, we got hauled on into Casper, where we spent several days and much moola getting the truck back on the road (remanufactured transfer case and front differential - again for the techies). That’s what life is all about, don’t ya know? Having fun while sitting in a dealership parking lot. They were very sweet — gave us a loaner so we could get groceries and go to a movie and see a bit of town; and their office building had a nice cool place to sit and use their internet — stuff like that. And we didn’t have the waiting room all to ourselves, so we made new friends, too. The movie? We went to see “Stillwater” and enjoyed it a lot. We were a bit nervous about going, but the theatre was doing distancing quite well, and there weren’t many folks there anyway. Our best meal? Lunch at Johnny J’s Diner on E. 2nd Street — to die for!
Back on the road finally and feeling suitably chastised, we decided we’d had plenty of Wyoming for this year. It was time to call it Almost Fall, and to start on our plan for the next couple of months. We are planning to be back down in Alabama (if there’s anything left of it after the current hurricanes and horrible storms they are experiencing) by November. In the meantime we are heading for a trip through the northern part of the middle — North Dakota, Wisconsin and Michigan; then down through Indiana and Kentucky and Tennessee, followed by heading for the southern Alabama countryside. And so far we’re having a very good time. We’ve been through some of these areas before, but it’s been many years — although not much has changed, at least so far.
We pretty much just zipped across eastern Wyoming before touching on on a corner of South Dakota as we headed toward North Dakota. The first thing we noticed? The air is so much clearer in the Dakotas!!!! We’d finally left all that smoke behind. Wahoo! And the grass is greener, too — much nicer than out west. A big change in scenery and a great first step on our Fall trip.
Our first destination in North Dakota was Teddy Roosevelt NP and the bison. We are quite fond of these massive critters, and there are bunches of them in residency. On our last visit, we’d stayed in the campground in the North Unit of the park, and the big guys were very common there. So we started up there again this year. And immediately found a group of them, calmly munching the flowers on the side of the road. Too cool. We sat and enjoyed them for the longest time; then continued on, taking in the views and the walks out to the edges of cliffs, stuff like that. This is one of our favorite parks.
The park wasn’t overly crowded, and we felt really good about that. We’d heard stories about most of the National Parks, how they were really jammed up and that people were having to be in line for long periods just to get in. But we’d chosen to wait until after Labor Day to enter, and in a more out of the way park like this one it worked just fine.
We arrived in that neck of the woods before the weekend started, but settled into a pretty dispersed camping spot in the vicinity, near the Little Missouri River until Tuesday, then drove right in. While in the park we met a nice lady traveling on her own and had a chat. Turns out she’s from Wisconsin and when we mentioned that we liked Door County maple syrup but wouldn’t be going that far south on this trip she told us stop in her town, Cornucopia, right up on the shores of Lake Superior; said they make pretty good syrup up there too.
After wallowing (no, no, just figuratively) in the bison in the North Unit (Teddy Roosevelt NP is broken into two sections), we took care of a few errands in the next town, then proceeded to head further down the hill on a quiet back road, to the other part of the park, the South Unit. On our way down we’d been looking for a spot to stop and came upon an open boat access area with nobody around so we spent a quiet overnight parked on the grass with geese and even a few swans nearby.
The South Unit also has bison, also has lovely hiking and viewing opportunities, and has prairie dogs too. Lots of them, curious and active and enjoying life. We did our best to take as many photos as possible; they really are cute, and fun to watch. And we enjoyed it all. This is a lovely park, with lots of badlands areas and wild rock formations; it’s a real treat. Lots more people in the south unit though as it is located just off I-94.
Another treat? We’d managed to hook up with email friends whom we’d never met. They were camping in the area and we got together, spending several hours giggling and comparing notes on what to do or not to do in North Dakota, chatting about future plans for “when Covid gets under control” — all the usual. It was lots of fun, and we’ll look forward to meeting up again one day, on down the road. Andrea and Thomas are great people, and it was fun putting faces to the names.
In talking, we’d agreed that North Dakota is a bit different from most states. You tend to move through and get on to something more exciting. But we wanted to give it a fair chance to impress. So we laid out a sort of zig zag path to mosey onward and take in a few of the sites we’d come up with to enjoy. There’s still lots of corn in the fields, the sunflowers were just about ready, but the hay was all rolled up, and the huge harvesting equipment was passing us on the road going further south. And there are a few trees starting to turn. So, fall was coming, but it had turned quite hot again so we kept moving.
Finishing up with Mr. TR, we followed a scenic road (ND22) going further north up through the Kildeer Mountain Range. It was a very pretty setting, a continuation of the badlands area in the park with increasing farmland, but unfortunately it led us right through an area where they were doing a tremendous amount of oil and gas production work. Frankly, it was ugly. Reminded me of Bakersfield and all the oil wells there… or any one of a number of areas in our country. But we won’t get started on that! Pretty countryside being spoiled by man’s endeavors is nothing new.
As we moved further east, the equipment disappeared off the land, and all was nice again. We were in open grassland, and that’s always pleasant. We were headed for Minot, where we had a package waiting for us, and several interesting sights to investigate.
Rick has plans to visit a number of automotive and aviation museums on this trip and the first of those to come along was the Dakota Territories Air Museum, located in Minot, which we confirmed is indeed pronounced like ‘Whynot’ as we’d always assumed. Interestingly, in conversation with the person at the museum she said that many folks assume more of a French background to the name and pronounce it like ‘Minnow’, with the accent on the second syllable, so she was pleased that we got it right. Stay with us here folks, never know what you might learn.
Anyway, we weren’t expecting much, but as it happens, this museum is a real find. Located at the airport, and housing plenty of planes that still fly regularly, it features two separate hangars full of planes, one for civilian craft, dating all the way back to a technically precise replica of the 1903 Wright Flier; and one for WWII military aircraft, which was particularly impressive. Both were quite stunning both in the quality of the planes and equally, the quality of the presentation. You can read the complete story and see our photos over at motor-museums.com.
Not wanting to let the airplanes outclass everything else, we stopped at a small Scandinavian village in town. We knew there was a Stave church there, which we wanted to see. We had really been impressed with them when we’d seen several in Norway. This was quite nice, and in very good shape. We had hoped to be able to tour the interior, but it wasn’t open at this time. Maybe on another visit. The park also had other interesting buildings, along with a large statue of a Dala horse, an iconic symbol of Sweden. And there is a very nice sculpture there of Hans Christian Andersen, holding a duck — the Ugly Duckling of story fame. We wandered and reminisced about our time in Scandinavia, back several years. It was quite nice. And to top it off? There was a truck on the street, selling fresh corn — 6 ears for $4.00. Perfect.
The northern mid-west is well known for enormous roadside structures and statues of various creatures so we thought we should see a few. We’d made a list of things to consider — a cow in New Salem, a huge sandhill crane in Steele, a buffalo museum in Jamestown, …(etc)… and several turtles.
Well, for us the turtles won First Prizes. North of Minot are a couple of ‘em; we opted to go to Bottineau for the Tommy Turtle statue, then to Dunseith to see The We’els Turtle. Why Turtles you might reasonably ask — Why Not(?) we reply. We don’t know the origin of the name, but there is a nearby Turtle Mountain, a Turtle River and a Turtle Lake, so it seems to be Turtle Country and along came La Tortuga to check it all out.
Enough turtle jokes you think, well, Ok. In nearby Rugby they have a cairn monument announcing that Rugby is the Geographical Center of North America — not to be confused with Lebanon, Kansas, which calls itself the center of the continental US. The cairn is really not all that much, but these things are important (aren’t they?). Oh, and somewhere we crossed the Continental Divide. Can you believe it? The ContDiv is in Colorado, right? In the mountains, right? Well, guess again! Who knew? In North Dakota it’s just a little bit south of the Sheyenne Reservation (and no, that’s not misspelled). At about 1500’ elevation it all looked pretty flat to us, but it seems the water somehow knows which way to go…
That night we watched the movie “Fargo.” How could we not. The next day we drove through Jamestown — the home of the Jamestown Jimmies. “Go Jimmies”, I guess. Jamestown is also where that Buffalo Museum is, complete with an enormous buffalo near the entrance. We’d been here before so didn’t bother with pictures. Then we were off to Fargo, on the eastern state line between North Dakota and Minnesota. We’re making progress here, doncha think?
Fargo is a nice city. Bigger than you could imagine. Has the best collection of big box stores and shopping opportunities between Denver and Chicago — or so it seemed to us. Also has the Roger Maris Museum, although we declined. And another air museum, also skipped after the guide back at the Minot museum admitted under questioning that no, Fargo wasn’t as good as Minot… oh, and the World’s Biggest Wooden Bat (as in baseball). We let that one slide too.
So that was that. We could have driven a bit further south, to Wahpeton, to see Whopper, a giant fish, but reluctantly we decided to press ahead.
Sadly, as we prepared to exit North Dakota we realized that we’d somehow bypassed the World’s Largest Cow, Fish, and Crane statues, but you’ve always got to leave something to look forward to for next time, or so we like to say. So many statues, so little time.
We are just getting ready to cross the Red River, leaving Fargo, North Dakota and entering the great state of Minnesota, home of 10,000 lakes, as they like to say. It’s mid-September and we are delighted; it’s been a long, dry summer, and an even longer time since we’ve been able to enjoy so much green, green, green. There is water everywhere in this state. And trees turning beautiful colors. And, best of all, fewer flies!!! We’d been accompanied by those little rascals ever since we’d come on our first cows, way back last spring. Not sorry to see them give way; to what? Oh, well, mosquitoes, of course. You know, all that water?
We’ll be back at ya’ soon, to tell you about the fall color in the far northern Midwest. Truly spectacular! Add in watching Canada geese fly over each and every pond… Oops… we’re getting ahead of ourselves, those are stories that haven’t happened yet, so you’ll have to wait a bit longer for them.
Oh, Bimidjii? That’s in the next story too. Don’t worry, we’ll get you there.
Stay cool, and stay safe!
Rick, Kathy and La Tortuga, Coddiwompling along as always
Ps: Thanks to Stephan and Annette for introducing us to Coddiwomple!
Yes, you will want to visit our Photo Page for this story