Blogarithm Syndication Sat, 25 May 2013 04:17:15 +0000 forum@bzpower.com (BZPower Forums) IP.Blog 60

 
We slept in a bit more today and headed out at 11:00 in rain. We were going up the Bow Valley Parkway, which parallels the Trans-Canada Highway to Lake Louise northwest of Banff. Instead of trying to go on the fast-paced highway, given the amount of precipitation, we decided to take the Parkway for a smoother, more wildlife-filled ride.
 

By 11:15 we'd seen an elk eating and walking over large downed branches on the side of a steep hill. We still could not see the tops of the mountains due to the cloud cover and rain, but we were nonetheless still awed by what scenery we could see.

At 11:40 we could see more elk lying down in an open field. All of the trailheads were closed due to the number of bears seen in the area, but even if they were open we still would have opted out of walking on them due to the rain. We kept being fooled by various stumps and rocks in fields, as we kept thinking that they were elk, deer, or moose.

A little after noon we pulled off the road to look at a few signs which told the story of World War I-era Canadian citizens who didn't sign up for duty and were rounded up and put in internment camps during the war. (However, most of those that were rounded up were homeless.) They targeted those of the same nationalities as they were fighting, assuming that those that didn't want to fight were actually enemies.

It was 2 degrees Celsius and snow began to mix in with the rain. The snow increased and the temperature dropped to 0 - freezing - as we shifted to third gear going down hills. By 12:30 rain had taken over again as the temperature had risen to 2 again. We saw a large black wolf trotting in the woods with some lunch flopping around in his mouth.

Then, a little after 12:30, we saw a large female grizzly bear along the side of the road, looking up at the stopped vehicles and finally walking away into the woods. She was a big one.

We reached the end of the Bow Valley Parkway by 12:45 and headed up to the famous Lake Louise area. It was one degree and snowing very hard, coming down thick with large flakes. It dropped to 0 again as we crossed the Continental Divide and soon we found ourselves parked and getting out to see Lake Louise.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

The temperature stayed at freezing for the entire time, and the snow that had fallen had melted just enough to make the walk down to Lake Louise slippery and dangerous. The snow was still coming down on top of us, piling on our hoods and backs and soaking through our shoes.

Then we looked out onto majestic Lake Louise and saw a bunch of fog. It was beautiful in its own right but I was too cold to appreciate it very well. We took out the camera underneath my mom's opened coat and got a few good shots. (She really took one for the team.)

We trudged back up the slippery slope and got back into the slightly warmer car. It was still freezing and the snow had compacted itself into ice along the bottom of the windshield. Bits of this ice would be flung off as the windshield wipers went on.

Our next stop was going to be Moraine Lake, but we were stopped by a Mountie with possibly the thickest Canadian accent one can have. (It still wasn't all that thick.) He told us that the snow was too thick up there and it'd take an hour to clear it with the snowplow. Considering that we're in a land used to getting through lots of snow the fact that they decided to close it off said it all. With no other places to stop we decided to go back to Banff via the Parkway in an attempt to see more critters.

We saw more critters - specifically a grizzly cub. He decided to walk along the road for a while until looking right at us as he cut across. After exploring the other side of the road, he presumably didn't know what all the fuss was about and, glad he was not a chicken, he ambled back to the other side of the road and scampered off into the woods.

We saw more mule deer as the temperature rose to 1, but it soon began to snow fully again when the temperature dropped to freezing again. The snow was the predominant precipitation, interspersed with rain when the temperature rose.

More mule deer ate along the side of the road, then soon we saw more elk munching away. As we pulled into Banff we saw more deer along the railroad tracks.

It was almost 3:00 and our breakfast wasn't holding us any longer. We found some free parking and ate a late lunch at Coyote's - which serves southwest-style food, the last thing one would expect in the Canadian Rockies. The meals were good but hardly filling, as I left the establishment with the same hunger headache I had entered with. We headed back to the hotel and lounged around for a bit before heading out for dinner at a famous Banff restaurant called Bumpers.

It was delicious. My dad and I both got some of the most tender prime rib on the face of the planet, complete with loaded baked potatoes and some puny token veggies. Our waitress was from Brisbane, Australia, and we entertained her by playing up on our southernness and drawled on about mint juleps when we saw that they had stuck a sprig of mint in the tea glasses.

(My dad and I ended up getting very, very punchy and decided to badly re-enact Romeo and Juliet with napkins folded around utensils. Also, I was offered a cocktail by the Aussie waitress, who was under the impression that I was twenty.)

Tomorrow: Jasper, Alberta, via the Bow Valley Parkway once again. We'll then walk onto a glacier.

(While I expect our hotel will have Internet, we're out in the middle of nowhere, so there may not be an entry for a few days.)]]> Sat, 25 May 2013 02:54:00 +0000

 
We got on the road before 10:00 and headed west on Trans-Canadian Highway 1. The first stop of the day was Medicine Hat, which, aside from its strange and awesome name, is the first major city after crossing into Alberta. We saw a donut-shaped cloud and large eastbound trucks - probably the most traffic we've seen on Highway 1 since we got on it in Brandon. We continued the pattern of gaining altitude and plateauing. This became much more pronounced today; we were most definitely in the foothills of the Rockies.

We saw groups of cows angled in the same direction as we drove past - we're not sure if it was in salute of my dad or of Yoder the duck. We passed a great many lakes - we're not sure if all of them have names. There are so many up here it'd only be useful to name the larger ones. Flags, few and far between as they were, flapped every which way but east. The clouds kept rolling around ominously as we headed into the impending onslaught of rain.

Then the rains began. It was not much at first but it continued to increase steadily as the day wore on.

Before 11:30 we were in Alberta and stopped at the visitor's center for information. Alberta is the only province where they sell you their maps instead of saying "eh" a few times and giving them to you. We skipped buying this in favor of a possibly lethal combination of our '96 road atlas and our homicidal GPS we've christened "Hal." Fortunately for us the road did not differ from our expectations.

It wasn't raining when we got out of the visitor's center but within a few minutes back on Highway 1 we got back into steady rain. The rain stopped briefly before we rolled into Medicine Hat for a late brunch at Subway. (The tomatoes may not have been fresh but the pickles were excellent.) We saw something that touts itself as the "world's largest teepee" but is little more than a gigantic steel frame with Indian shields all around as decoration.

After brief road work on the Medicine Hat outskirts it began raining again. After a gas - sorry, petrol - stop, we headed towards Calgary as I played appropriate music on the iPod.

(Side note: Alberta is the first province we've gotten to that has counties. While all states have either counties or county equivalents as a level of government, few provinces have them. The population is so sparse, apparently, that it's not worth setting up an extra level of government and most things are controlled at the provincial level. Alberta, however, has counties, and I think British Columbia does too. We'll see if that's true in a few days.)

The temperature began a steady decline as we rolled towards Calgary. Around this time we saw a wolf dart along the road and various canals to help irrigate the many vast farms along the highway. We saw even more cows standing in our direction as we went past, so we decided on the name "Yoder Salute." I waved the little duck at them as we passed, to which the cows seemed happy enough.

(The only other explanation for this action would be if the cows were about to do a gigantic Harlem Shake, but that's something one would expect more in a Far Side cartoon.)

A little after 3:00 we were in Strathmore and within the half-hour we'd made it to the Calgary city limit.

Three things happened in Calgary that were unexpected. The first was the rain. It absolutely burst as we made our way through the province's largest city. The second was the sheer amount of stoplights, the equivalent of running an Interstate through a city and putting stoplights on it. The third was the traffic, which backed up through multiple intersections. Drivers weaved in and out and no one used their signals. Cars squeezed through nearly nonexistent gaps and ran red lights with nonchalance. Combined with the intensity of the rain we were lucky to not have witnessed or been involved in an accident.

At 4:00 we were towards the other side of Calgary and saw Olympic Park as the rain kept up and the temperature kept falling. It was 5 degrees C (41F) at 4:00 and dropped to 3 (37) by 4:08. The trees and evergreens we saw along the sides of the road were reminiscent of the Sierra Nevada range.

And then it got scary.

We had climbed up far enough for some of the lower clouds to be below us in valleys. The temperature hovered at 1 (34) as half the rain became slushy and the other half was snow. Around this time we began to catch glimpses of the awesome Canadian Rockies jutting up around us, sheer rock faces that began in the shrouded valleys and went all the way up to an equally shrouded sky. Snow was visible not just near the tops of mountains, but weighing down the evergreens and whitening up the sides of the road.

Our concern was that the temperature would drop to 0 and we would lose traction on what would be an icy road, especially around a section with many bridges. Fortunately this did not happen, as the precipitation slowed to a more moderate pace and the temperature warmed to a balmy 2 degrees as we passed Lac Des Arcs.

It was nearly five o'clock as we rolled towards Canmore, the last town before Banff itself. A little before the entrance to Banff National Park it dropped back down to 1 as the rains increased slightly. After paying to get into the park we got to Banff within short order - but not before seeing two herds of majestic elk and a good number of mule deer. A little after 5:00 we got to our hotel.

After lounging in our hotel room for about an hour and a half, we decided it was time to head out and satisfy our ravenous hunger with some famous Alberta beef. Research was attempted but limited, as everywhere we looked seemed absolutely delicious. All we knew when we walked out is that we wanted some Alberta beef.

We could not find the place we were looking for. Bundled up in our parkas, we still got cold after a while and ducked into a small mall where we asked two ladies at a clothing store where the place was. The next thing we know, one of them was drawing fervently on our town map and rapidly described all kinds of restaurants, half of which she said that she'd worked at. (Apparently there's a Greek place somewhere around here whose owner speaks in a thick accent and was described as a "real-life Soup Nazi.")

We thanked them profusely before ducking back out into the cold. After almost getting turned around we found the steak place. I came very close to ordering escargot but ended up getting a steak. (I now know what all the fuss is about when it comes to Alberta beef - as well as why we heard it described as "Canada's Texas." Continuing from that analogy, I suppose that the Yukon is "Canada's Idaho.") Aside from the steaks, the salads and bread both had enough garlic to be delicious and make us stink for a good while to come.

They also had delicious sweet iced tea which had a hint of some sort of strawberry or something? I don't know what it was but I sucked down two glasses and it was good.

It was then that the next adventure began: the search for something to drink. The coffee machines in the lobby were out of coffee so we opted for getting some water at the vending machine near our room. But the vending machine, for some inexplicable reason, spewed out a disgusting drink called a Five Alive which tastes like old, watered-down, carbonated orange juice - except somehow worse. Eventually waters were retrieved from the car which is in a tiny parking garage underneath the building. (Seriously, this thing is so small a bicyclist would have trouble navigating. Getting out is going to take some serious work.)

Tomorrow: We explore Banff more. It's expected to snow tomorrow, actually - hope it doesn't block any views.]]> Fri, 24 May 2013 04:52:00 +0000
 

We left Brandon a little after ten-thirty after a filling breakfast. We were outside of the city - Manitoba's second largest - within no time, and by eleven we were seeing vast, wide-open expanses of sheer nothingness where we could see forever.

Nearly noon, we found ourselves in Saskatchewan (province #2) at their welcome center, where we met two upbeat ladies who showed us interesting pamphlets for and lively descriptions of Saskatchewan attractions. While we did not end up getting to many of the things they showed us, we learned about the province. Their flag is highly interesting and their tourism ad campaign centers around the phrase "hard to spell, easy to draw."

I inquired as to the origin of the name of Diefenbaker Lake, mentioning that it sounded German, and was told that it was named after a former Prime Minister way back when, to which I said "I guess that was back when they had names like Diefenbaker."

Saskatchewan, in addition to its profound rectangularity, has the world's largest Kimberlite fields and is a major source of the world's potash and uranium. It does not follow daylight saving time and thus we moved an hour backwards a province earlier than we had anticipated, which was as welcome as it was unexpected.

A little before 11:30 we pulled into the first bank we saw in Moosomin (pronounced MOOSE-mon), Saskatchewan's first major city after the border crossing, to exchange a hundred dollars into Canadian currency. (Canada, we figured, was too large to get across by credit card alone.) As our luck would have it the exchange rate is at an unprecedented 1-to-1 ratio after days of fluctuation. Hopefully it tilts back in our favor if we have any cash left before we get back to the States.

I forgot just how interesting Canadian currency is, or perhaps I never studied it while in Toronto. One of the bills I got a good look at was purple and had a scene of boys playing hockey on the back. Next to this is an interesting quote which I can't remember at the moment. (All of the bills I looked at were very pretty and interesting to look at. [Sure beats a creepy one-eyed floating pyramid, I know that much. No wonder conspiracy theorists think something's up; no currency could possibly be as dull as ours without some deeper meaning.])

Back on the road, we spotted white smoke in the distance and figured it was a forest fire. About a half-hour later we caught up to where the smoke was and it smelled exquisite, almost like a gigantic hickory-smoke barbecue was going on somewhere up north. This was the deciding factor in not going north to the valley area we'd heard about from the welcome center.

The scenery is beautiful, to be sure, but there comes a point where it gets dull and one begins to notice smaller and smaller details to alleviate the boredom. Between Whitewood and Broadview we began a barely noticeable climb that lasted for most of the province east of Regina. We would never go downhill; we would only plateau for a while before we went uphill again.

(Side note: the Trans-Canada highway is Canada's major and only coast-to-coast highway. It is their equivalent of the US Interstate system. One would think that, being the fastest route from the ports of British Columbia to the major population centers of Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes, there would be traffic, but it is deserted to the point where we wondered why there were two lanes in both directions.)

Signs for cities were three-dimensional and interesting, such as a gigantic G with something inside it (I didn't get a good look) for the town of Grenfell. We passed a number of these tiny towns before we found ourselves, suddenly, in Regina.

We got gas in Regina and attempted to find some distinctly Canadian place to get some late lunch, but most places were slammed even though it was nearly 2:00. We ate Nutter Butters in an attempt to tide us over to Moose Jaw, which is the only major city between Regina and Swift Current.

By 2:30 we had made it to Moose Jaw and a gigantic moose statue at the welcome center. We entertained the ladies at the welcome center and they gave us plenty of information about Moose Jaw.

Back around the turn of the century, Moose Jaw was notorious for its rampant vices. Law enforcement looked the other way as long as gang activity was confined to the thriving red light district. As a vestige of their past, the tunnels underneath the city - which were used as hideouts for bootlegging operations during Prohibition and were used extensively by Al Capone - have been maintained, and themed guided tours run daily.

We heard of these when we had first crossed over the Saskatchewan border but things got more interesting the more we heard about them. It's one of the more distinctive things about Moose Jaw (aside from its many murals randomly placed around downtown) and something that seemed right up our alley, so we went on a tour.

The guides on the tour are entirely in-character - one a 30s showgirl and the other Capone's right-hand man. The both took half of the tour. I must applaud them for staying in-character, as we did all we could to get them to crack up and break character. (The one guy nearly lost it when my dad mentioned deep-frying possums, but he held it together nicely.) During the tour we also received nicknames - I was "Mr. Touchy," my dad was "Joe," and my mom was "honey." While a tad corny, I soon learned to enjoy the banter when they asked questions. (When they asked us where we were going, we told them "the north pole," and when they asked why we told them "because Santa needs a drink too.")

The tour was more informative than simply showing you around telling you what went on, which would have gotten old.

After this we stopped at a local place called the Deja Vu Cafe, which came highly recommended by the Moose Jaw visitor's center and featured on a show called "You Gotta Eat Here," which is the Canadian version of Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. Their menu featured well over fifty sauces and well over fifty milkshakes. We got six of the most popular sauces for our wings and chicken strips as recommended to us by our waitress (who picked up on our accents right off the bat).
 
While there, I got the chance to try something I'd been itching to try ever since getting into Canada: a poutine. For those unaware, a poutine is a disgusting-looking side item made by taking french fries, putting a vast amount of cheese on top of them, and then, as if that wasn't enough, pouring hot, sticky gravy over the whole thing. It was somewhat more appetizing than it looked (and tasted better with sauce) but I couldn't eat it all.

A little after 5:30 we were back on the Trans-Canada Highway and got into some different scenery. The eastbound and westbound portions of the highway split off from each other with over a mile between them on occasion. The reason for these splits are unclear but it seems to have to do with farmland and to accommodate some of the region's many small lakes.

We went over a hill and found ourselves looking down into a vast white valley filled with flat sheets of an indeterminate white mineral we later determined was sodium sulfate accumulated from the nine-mile-long, three-mile-wide Lake Chaplin, one of the largest salt lakes on the continent outside of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. (I was first alerted to its mineral content because it smelled atrocious as we drove through.) The same white stuff had accumulated along the banks of the lake and cows did not drink from it. Ducks loved both it and the small briny lakes around it, and we saw them with their heads underwater more often than not as they were searched for shrimp to snack on. Also on the lake was a dirt road on a culver that went all the way across the lake to facilitate transportation without going around the lake.

By 7:00 we were nearing Swift Current and saw tunnels that cut underneath the highway. I assume that these are for farmers and animals to be able to cross the highway without the danger of getting run over, but I'm pretty sure someone could suntan for an hour on most stretches without being in a great amount of danger. (I certainly wouldn't try it, though; my skin is too fair.)

A little after 7:15 we made it to our hotel and got to our room, which is spacious if a little odd-smelling. You can still see a bit of the sun and it's 9:41.

Tomorrow: we trek even further north to Banff National Park in Alberta.]]> Thu, 23 May 2013 03:49:00 +0000

We had a filling breakfast of eggs Benedict far surpassed last night's dinner in terms of flavor. The storm system that had pasted us last night was still in the area, but had moved past far enough for us to make good time west across North Dakota. Our first stop of the day was the geographical center of North America at a town called Rugby. We took US 2 all the way there.

We saw a bunch of red-winged blackbirds. It was raining intermittently and gusted indefinitely. The record rains North Dakota has been getting create impromptu lakes along the sides of the road to the degree that you sometimes feel as if you're still on the Mackinac Bridge. We saw cloud cover low enough to obscure whatever windmill blade happened to be on top.

At 12:30 we stopped at a rest area. A fellow in a red shirt walked by as we used the term "lunch" to describe small bird roadkill in the parking log. My dad then proceeded to tell him about our usage of the word, as well as more recent additions to our dialect such as "snack pack," "dinner party," and "buffet," which all mean different things for different kinds of roadkill. The man said "oh, good to know" and hurried away. As he walked back to his car, we were still looking at literature inside, so I decided to prank him by locking the car until it honked as he walked past.

I think we disturbed him.

At 1:35 we arrived in Rugby and pulled over to see the geographic center. All that was there was a small stone obelisk with a few plaques on it, along with the flags of the US, Canada, and Mexico. We got as many pictures as is was possible to take, as the wind was whipping all around us. My dad and I barely held onto our hats as we staggered back to the car.

We went through downtown Rugby and saw, amongst other things, a water treatment plant. Now, water treatment plants are not usually considered interesting sights, but Rugby is a sleepy town and their only claim to fame is found in its location. The water treatment plant used a bunch of fire hydrants as decoration.

From Rugby we went to the Canadian border via state route 3 and were surprised by the hilliness of the area. It was not mountainous but it was not the sheer flatness that had characterized the state up until Rugby.

A little less than an hour later we got to the Canadian border, but we did not go through customs first. Instead, we went inside the Canadian border at a place called the International Peace Garden. It's the only place where you can drive into and walk around in Canada without the need for going through customs. The border was symbolized with various cool-looking monuments all around the Garden, but we barely saw anyone else there save for a few construction workers renovating the small chapel there. The border ran through the exact center of the building, through the pulpit and organ. We didn't stick around in there for long because of the constant sound of jackhammers. but they had a plethora of cool quotes carved into marble around the sides.

We got a number of dumb pictures goofing off on the border, jumping over it and making faces. My mom was the resident nonplussed designated picture-taker.

There was also a bell tower there and a memorial to the 9/11 victims with a mangled mass of steel and concrete from Ground Zero. Continuing with the theme of international cooperation between the US and Canada, the signs around the memorial emphasized Canada's role in the aftermath of the tragedy.

Before we exited the Peace Garden area we pulled into the nearly deserted parking lot of their interpretive center, next to - of all things - a car with another North Carolina license plate. We found them inside the center's greenhouse. They were a young couple on their own road trip, though not as massive as ours is going to end up being.

The greenhouse houses a large collection of cacti, of all things. Almost every species was present inside the large, humid building, and we found strange specimens ranging from furry towers to spiked melons to vines. It was apparently the private collection of a rich fellow who lived in the southwest and moved to Minot. After the Minot floods a few years back they moved the collection to the Peace Garden. There was only enough room in the center's greenhouse for about a third of the entire collection and the rest is in other greenhouses on the property waiting to be moved into the center's greenhouse when it is expanded.

After talking to the musician at the gift shop for a little while we got back on the road and headed towards Canada. It took a while to get through the border but the customs guy was friendly. (In our discussion with him we learned that Americans commonly attempt to smuggle firearms across the Canadian border.) He checked out our passports and heard him say "eh," which was rather fun.

We crossed into Manitoba and played "O, Canada" as we changed the car's settings to Metric. We had fun trying to figure out the temperature gauge in Celsius and fiddled with it for a while. The road up to Brandon was littered with potholes of all sizes.

En route to Brandon we passed through the small town of Boissevain. The customs guard had told us to "look out for the turtle" as we drove through. The turtle was hard to miss to the the fact that it was 30 feet tall. The rural roads that intersected the highway were rarely, if ever, paved.

At around 5:00 we passed a fun billboard advertising Wendy's Baconator that said "Holy Cow and Pig!" A few minutes later we rolled into Brandon and within short order found the hotel.

We went out to find supper and my dad had a hankering for Mexican food so we pulled into a Qdoba. The girl who checked us out was giving him a hard time for not drinking a beer and intimated that she had connections that would prevent us from getting arrested if he drove drunk.

Now we're back in the hotel trying everything we can to get the internet to speed up to a snail's pace. My mom is walking all over the room to try and get various pages to load on the iPad and I think she's found a spot in a corner that's a bit faster.

Tomorrow: we head westward once again on the Trans-Canadian Highway bound for Swift Current, Saskatchewan.]]> Wed, 22 May 2013 01:36:00 +0000 Does anyone even read these?

 
Our first stop of the day was in Northfield, a short drive from Minneapolis and a cute college town, home to crosstown rivals Carleton and St. Olaf.

What should have taken thirty minutes took instead about fifty, as the Interstate down was closed.

Every state has its own type of road construction, but Minnesota has its own special brand of messed up. The signs that should have denoted the complete and utter closing of the Interstate were cryptic, and we were forced to detour along a county road out into the middle of nowhere. We made our way down back roads to Northfield and poked around the St. Olaf and Carleton campuses - but mainly Carleton's, as the architecture is more interesting and diverse.

In addition to housing the two colleges (whose rivalry traditions include a massive annual snowball fight), Northfield is on the 45th parallel which we crossed in Michigan on the second day of the trip, and is the site of the near-capture of Jesse James and the start of a cascade of events leading up to his assassination. The place has annual Jesse James days where they do a re-enactment of that day's events.

It was pouring rain by the time we'd finished looking around, and found a small cafe to have some lunch. Their sandwiches and wraps were nominal, but the real treats were in their ice creams. My dad got some coconut almond while my mom and I split praline pecan.

(While poking around in an adjoining shop, I found what was possibly the most innately wrong book on the entire continent: a bizarre picture book about Finland which featured, on its cover, a naked family in a sauna. Leaves were placed in convenient locations but this did not make the scene any easier to deal with; if anything, the foliage made it even creepier.)

The rains had gone, so we left Northfield and headed back up to Fargo via Minneapolis. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper going 75 miles an hour and the rains were intermittent. Eventually the traffic peeled off into the suburbs and we were left on I-94 bound for the North Dakota border. The terrain had begun to flatten considerably, and any low areas were filled with standing waters. I could not tell if some were outright lakes or simply glorified puddles from the record days of rain in this section of the country.

A little after 6:00 we crossed over into North Dakota (state #8) into Fargo and continued on past the I-29 interchange to get to the deserted welcome center, which featured sinks that jutted far enough out to wash a small farm animal and a lady behind the desk who had the personality of a sedated anteater. Not knowing where the independent Fargo-Moorhead RedHawks might sell a pennant for the collection, she directed us to a place down the street called Scheel's, which is apparently a local chain of stores.

This place was a shrunken-down Mall of America, except it was all one store - kind of like a multi-story combination of Wal-Mart and Bass Pro Shops sprinkled with uncanny mannequin doppelgängers of various US Presidents and a ferris wheel inside.

Clearly, when it comes to attractions, these folks prefer the great indoors.

We found many cool items and more than a few RedHawks-related hats and t-shirts, but we did not find a pennant. The employees told us that they might have something inside the mall a little farther into the city, but after walking around a few levels of the store and getting progressively more disturbed with each disturbing fake President we passed, we decided to head on up to Grand Forks. One look at the weather solidified this notion for us.

We could not outrun this weather.

North Dakotans are possibly the craziest of all drivers when out in the elements, as they flew past us going 85 or 90 when 65 was pushing it in the torrential downpour and gusting winds. While completely flat out there, the road construction did not help matters. Occasional reprieves from the rains made for a somewhat faster drive but we could not make ideal time because we'd just run back into another wall of rain.

After eight we were out of the road work and nearly to the hotel, and before 8:30 we made it. The madness of today combined with leftover tiredness from yesterday made the decision to eat at the hotel easy, especially because the hotel chain we're at usually has pretty good food.

They had one waitress, one cook, and about thirty people to serve. How very badly this particular hotel is staffed cannot be overemphasized. Food came out from the kitchen at a snail's pace and was delivered even slower. With no one to clean the tables, the lone waitress cleaned them on a need-only basis and did so five minutes after we had sat down.

Our food showed up after what felt like an hour, and the flavor was absolutely nonexistent. The bread I had with my chicken parmesan was the most flavorful part of the entire experience, as the chicken was not only nearly burnt but tasted like it had been reheated twenty-nine different times over the course of a week and a half, and I'm pretty sure what little sauce was present on my pasta was scraped from the bottom of an old bottle of Ragù.

I cleaned this plate off because it was sustenance. Under circumstances where my hunger was not nearly so dire I would have probably only gone as far as to sniff it.

Tomorrow: the exact center of North America in Rugby, ND, then north to Manitoba.]]> Tue, 21 May 2013 03:54:00 +0000

 
We left for the Mall of America at 12:20 and arrived a few minutes later. It's strange seeing the place - there's really nothing quite like it.

It's not because of the shops. It's because they have roller coasters inside.

Roller coasters.

Inside.

We walked through this gigantic area en route to the LEGO store, but had enough time to get all-day wristband passes to (nearly) all the rides. The kiddie rides are mixed in with the larger ones and the larger ones were built over, around, and occasionally inside each other. The one we rode first was sponsored by Pepsi and had no real theme to it save for a gigantic Pepsi logo.

We got to the LEGO store which we poked around a bit, discussing the modular series with employees and admiring their three-story Pick-A-Brick wall. (There was no way to get to the top levels of parts which were repeats of parts found down below; the wall is mostly for show.)

This is where we met Paleo and, briefly, his mother. (I asked him if he dreamed about farm animals.) Paleo and I went to get a wristband, but the machine proceeded to break on him as soon as he swiped his credit card and did not print out a wristband. Fortunately various employees came over, voided the transaction, and supplied him with a wristband.

As this point we all put Spongebob-themed hats on our heads for some reason and took insane pictures.

The next stop was one of the more fun rides - I forget the name of the thing, but is carries four people and spins you around as you go down hills and around tight turns. Each time we rode it was different because each car they have spins just a wee bit differently. (The second-to-last time we rode it, the car was very loose and spun around at an alarming and possibly dangerous rate. We got the same car the last time around but they had apparently tightened it up.)

While in the line for this ride Paleo found a small pile of pennies barely within reach along a small ledge on a wall. I don't know whose they were but whoever they are, they're out roughly eleven cents.

Paleo and I attempted to get on a ride where you get harnessed in and walk a series of planks and ropes up three stories. However, this ride was not included on our wristband and neither of us felt like paying more for 45 minutes of tedious walking around three stories high.

Having not eaten breakfast at this point, we got ice cream (a dairy product and thus acceptable for breakfast) and meandered around the theme park area for a while talking about various dumb things that I can't really remember at this point. Somewhere in here we met back up with my mom and dad and we headed over to do another ride themed around the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which is just about the single dumbest concept for a show in the recent history of ever.

This ride was interesting because of its uniqueness - you get locked down into seats that have wings on them. The seats can be rotated left and right by moving the wings, but the seats could neither lean forward nor spin. Each seat was attached to a large pole, which was controlled by a massive spinning hand which was set at an angle. The large counterweight would have kept the ride spinning indefinitely, as you climbed up three floors and then flew back down to your feet nearly touching the ground. To stop it, the brakes had to be engaged at the apex of the flight.

Somewhere in here we went to a Peeps store and looked around at all manner of Peeps-related items including large plushies, small hats, and mouse pads. We found a reincarnation of Toxic Waste Bunny amidst all this which we all rubbed our faces on for posterity.

Also in this store was a Mike & Ike candy dispenser. I found no difference between Mike & Ike and regular jelly beans, aside from the shape of the candy. Present in one section of the store was a display where you placed your hand with a gigantic stylized thermometer next to it to tell you how hot your hand was. I rubbed the palmprint icon like there was no tomorrow and achieved the highest level possible on the thermometer. (My dad was next, followed by Paleo and my mom at about half what I got.) I won nothing for this endeavor save for an enormous amount of disbelief in my own sanity.
 
(Some time before this we wore baby-sized hats and made the dumbest of faces at each other. These moments were recorded for the sake of posterity, and for emergency use if I ever begin to take myself seriously.)

After this (I think?) Paleo and I went over a bridge (over part of the water slide ride) doing Gangnam Style. We taught him my dad's "Hamster Dance" as we walked back over to the spinning ride.

Nestled within these events was a trip back to the LEGO store, where I acquired three collectible minifigures, one of which is likely the 10th series baseball player. Paleo also got a few, and we were both helped in our endeavors by a highly knowledgeable pair of enthusiastic six-year-olds.

I stopped Paleo on a number of occasions from telling me the plot of the Doctor Who season finale. All he was able to say was that "everything finally makes sense." (Please keep me away from spoilers for the next few weeks, will you?)

I know other things happened but I'm incredibly tired while writing this and I'm only remembering some bits, like when Paleo told me that the way I said something sounded British. (I wish I remember what it is that I apparently say British-like.) Also he kept telling me that I had to see the new Star Trek movie, even though it was packed with references and I have seen very little Star Trek in my life. (Two episodes of the original series, one and a half movies, an understanding of phrases that have made it into the vernacular, and the plotline to the Tribbles episode is literally all I know.)

Around 5:30, Paleo and I hopped on the Pepsi ride for the last time. This is where we somehow became interested in what US Patent No. 1 is - apparently it was given to some Senator who invented something for steam locomotives.

After departing the ride, we walked over to the LEGO store where my parents had just finished off some banana milkshakes from Orange Julius. With a little bit of time left, Paleo and I went on the spinning ride one last time before he had to leave.

On the way out we got more pictures of the place's sheer vastness. We also got a good look at a project where a bunch of people were painting old pianos to apparently get young people interested in music.

We took the shuttle back to the hotel and, being drained from being up and on our feet all day, we rested up. At 8:30 we left the hotel bound for Culver's to see Takuma Nuva. I ran in a few minutes after 9:00 and saw him (and Tom, his incredibly tall cousin) for the first time since last BrickFair. We hung out at a table, and I ate something called the S-Mizzle, a variation on the M-Drizzle (or something like that; I can't remember the exact name) that Takuma invented. It had chicken with bacon and of lettuce and pickles and mayonnaise on some toasted sourdough bread and was delicious.

Takuma could be a comedian with his sense of comedic timing. Stories of his family's trips and his experiences working at a drive-thru were made even funnier by his descriptions. (For example, he described his dad's snoring as "so loud it would vibrate you and digest things in your belly even if you were dead" and the seasons in Minnesota as "almost winter, winter, still winter, and road construction.")

Takuma was also generous enough to pay for our meal, and we promised that if we ever were within 500 miles of Minneapolis we'd make a detour. We had the first ever Cheese Curd Ceremony where I gave him a cheese curd and he ate it, in recognition of his generosity. My dad retrieved the hot dog hat from the trunk and sandwiched it in a small hatpile between Takuma's hat and Tom's hat. After this was over I donned the hot dog hat, and no sooner did I do this than a fellow who looked like a teenage Bob Costas walk of the bathroom and said "dude! I love your hat!"
 
(We also made a ton of puns about fire, which explains half of the entry title.)
 
But it was 10:30 by this time, Culver's was closing, and we had to get back to the hotel as it began to rain.
 
Tomorrow: Grand Forks, North Dakota. The second leg of the road trip is about to begin.]]> Mon, 20 May 2013 04:33:00 +0000 Possibly a seven-foot-tall man with a handlebar mustache and the voice of James Earl Jones and the ability to carry on an in-depth discussion about the US Patent Office.
 
(Only one of these is actually true.)]]> Mon, 20 May 2013 00:05:00 +0000

 
At 10:00 we left Wausau bound for Minnesota. By 10:40 we made it to Abbotsford, the first city in Wisconsin. The sky was overcast and very cloudy. We passed farms and saw various farm animals as well as various farms and silos. While different, the sameness of the road was tiresome after a while.

We were surprised to see signs warning of Amish buggies, and saw a farm animal pulling a plow, but did not see any horse-and-buggy combinations then. Each small town we passed through on the route featured beautiful and customized signs with the town name and motto. Wisconsin towns are clean and have a lot of pride in themselves.

Trees became a more common sight as the hills began to roll as we headed towards Chippewa Falls. The sky began to darken just a little bit more the farther we went towards Minnesota.

We neared Eau Claire as my mom read to us from her back-seat nest of a massive rivalry. Apparently, Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls had a massive rivalry as they competed for dominance in the state's once-large logging industry. However, when the forests were depleted, the towns both turned to other fields. No word on whether they're still bitter with each other.

Trees in Wisconsin are just starting to bloom, as the long winter has finally passed. A little before noon it began to drizzle as we merged onto Interstate 94 bound for the Twin Cities.

The road became very wet very quickly as trucks churned up mist. We had to pull off the highway and stopped for gas about 30 miles east of the Minnesota border. It was pouring rain at this point. Pulling out of the gas station, we saw an Amish buggy before getting back on I-94.

By 12:30 we were heading out of the storm and the rain had decreased to a steady drizzle and saw a coyote near the road. The rain stopped as we crossed the Mississippi into Minnesota (state #7). We stopped at the welcome center and saw a number of interesting characters, including a man with his shirt half-off crouched over on a picnic table, around 15 Amish men and women, and an anorexic hippy who, my mom testified, busied herself in the bathroom by washing her hair in the sink.

At 1:00 we were in the Twin Cities, crossed the Mississippi again, and tried to find a place we'd seen on TV called Pizzeria Lola. The route there did not seem hard - just go on the expressway until you exit off and go on Xerxes Avenue.
 
What we did not realize is that not only did the exit we were supposed to take nonexistent, but that there seems to be more than one Xerxes Avenue. In our attempts to get to our hotel we ran into this road a number of times, but we did not take it at any point for fear of getting even more desperately lost. At that point, all we wanted to do was get to our hotel.

We had seen what we thought was our hotel from the Interstate into Minneapolis, but that one turned out to be different. Thinking that was the only one, we were confused when our GPS told us to pass it. We pulled off into a Culver's parking lot and called the hotel. After a series of unfortunate misunderstandings, everything went better than expected; our hotel was right where it was supposed to be. Our confusion was due to the fact that it can't be seen from the highway. We then ate at Culver's and sipped on some milkshakes as we went to our hotel.

Heading off at around 6:45 for the stadium of the independent league St. Paul Saints, we took a detour and drove around Macalester College. The outfield fence at their field was incredibly short but also incredibly high, at they built the field into very limited space. It would have been fun to see a game there - my dad called it "arena baseball."

At 7:15 we parked near the stadium in the Lions Club parking lot, where the attendants could not believe that we had driven over 1500 miles from North Carolina. One guy even ran behind the car to check our license plate out. Clearly we need to play up on our accents and throw in more "y'all"s. 

The game was insane, and by insane I of course mean our brand of insane. One of the highest-drawing independent teams in the country, the Saints are co-owned by the grandson of famous baseball owner Bill Veeck, the mind behind such infamous fiascos as pinch-hitting midget Eddie Gaedel, 10-cent beer night, and the infamous Disco Demolition. His grandson carries on a muted version of this bizarre tradition, with such between-inning games as the tire roll race and various contestants trying to put on a frozen t-shirt first.

The Saints also have various characters who are paid to just walk around in-character to entertain (and occasionally harass) fans. One fellow alternated between French chef and train conductor, another was dressed in drag and hobbled around on a walker, and yet another was basically Elvis meets Mr. Sulu. (Oh my.)

One of the most inventive traditions the Saints have is the annual pig mascot, named before Opening Day and announced with smoke signals like they're selecting a new Pope. Previous pig names included Kim Lardashian, Kris Hamphries, and Kevin Bacon.

Their PA announcer wandered around the stadium and I'm still not sure if he was drunk or not. He asked fans dumb questions and made fun of the other team. During the "charge" cheer, he did the "charge" yell in a very small, sleepy voice the first time, then burped the next time and didn't say anything the third. He also told all the fans that he "hoped they all had their jumper cables." (If my dad were a PA announcer, he'd be that guy.)

The food at the stadium was also excellent, as it is one of the only independent teams in the country to have a VP to run the stadium food. We sampled gyros and cheese curds - both of which were fresh and excellent. We left a bit early to get ahead of the large, drunken crowd, but when we left the Saints were beating the New Jersey Jackals 7-2. (The Jackals starter got hammered in the first two innings - he had no control and kept leaving pitches over the plate.)

Tomorrow, I'll be at the Mall of America meeting Paleo at the LEGO store. We'll also go and meet Takuma Nuva later on in the day.]]> Sun, 19 May 2013 03:28:00 +0000 I'll be hanging around the LEGO store at the Mall of America around 1:00 this Sunday wearing something orange. If you live close by, feel free to show up and we can dream about farm animals together.
 ]]> Sat, 18 May 2013 14:41:00 +0000

 
The day began in Mackinaw City at around seven o'clock in the morning. We hadn't planned on getting such an early start, but the northern latitude of the city meant more daylight hours and earlier waking. We checked out, gassed up, and began the day crossing the epic Mackinac Bridge.

It's a gigantic bridge. There's nothing special about it other than that it's just massive. You think it's going to start dipping down to the other side but it just keeps on going. Of course, we made it to the upper peninsula with no issue and hit highway 123 en route to Lake Superior, the only Great Lake we have not seen on any road trip.

We saw deer eating, incredibly straight roads, lots and lots of trees, and what may or may not have been a black bear bounding across the road. By 9:09 it was 52 degrees, and we saw very skinny trees. We were bound for Lake Superior, and the closest point to us was Whitefish Bay, mentioned in Gordon Lightfoot's ballad "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." It was creepy listening to the song as we caught glimpses of Superior beyond the trees.

After our Superior sighting, we had our sights set on Tahquamenon (rhymes with "phenomenon") Falls State Park. The park is divided into the lower and upper falls, which we visited in that order. The lower falls featured a couple of waterfalls around a small island and did not have many visitors. The water that feeds the falls is colored by tannins, leaving it a rich brown-orange hue. When the water stops, the tannins congeal on top to create a white foam that flows by and looks not unlike snow-colored lava. I poked my finger in it and it came out covered in brown silt.

By 10:10 we were on the way to the upper falls, which is much more picturesque. In terms of sheer volume, the upper Tahquamenon falls is the second-largest waterfall east of the Mississippi. (The first is, of course, Niagara Falls.) This water is also colored orange-brown. You can walk out on a wooden deck almost right up to the waterfall down 94 steps, with the ominous sign "94 Steps to Brink." My dad, of course, rubbed his nascent beard on it.

(Side note: Michigan drivers often fly past you on two-lane roads going seventy miles an hour, then get right in front of you going ever so slightly slower than the posted speed limit. In addition to the terms "California roll" and "Texas turn" coined on other trips, I think I'm going to add "Michigan pass" to the lexicon.)

Around 11:00 we were back on route 123 bound for Newberry. We passed swampy areas and turned onto routes 28 and 117 through farmland and pastures ready to plant crops. (Just last Saturday, we were informed, the U.P. got snowed on.) Before noon, we were heading west on US 2.

The scenery, while pretty, was nothing that we hadn't seen before, but was markedly different from what I expected from the U.P. We'd gone back down and skirted along the edge of Lake Michigan and made bad puns.

We saw old road signs in Escanaba after crossing the Rapid River and got lunch at a Culver's, which, being a more local chain, I have never been to (though I hear there's one in Charlotte). My dad got a peanut-butter-and-chocolate milkshake as dessert and looked like a little kid when sipping on it.

(Somewhere in here we unknowingly crossed over into Central time. This is the first time I've crossed over time zone borders and not seen a sign - perhaps because we did not cross on a major road.)

We entered Wisconsin just south of Menominee - the southernmost town in the U.P. - at a town called Marinette. Our route to Wausau took us through secondary roads and a ton of cute downtown areas evocative of Norman Rockwell. The landscape was lumpy; what you see on dairy products is not unrealistic or romanticized. (It does, however, smell incredibly bad.)

Passing Shawano Lake, we took route 29 west. Barns along the road have diamond-shaped designs on their massive silos almost like pieces of a Paul Bunyan-sized quilt.

By 4:18 we had gone 1300 miles and saw large hills in the distance towards Wausau. The rain, which had been drizzling for hours, began to come down steadier as we pulled off the road to our hotel.

We got food at a local chain called Hudson's, which is kind of like Applebee's with a car theme. We tried cheese curds and liked them. My dad put an orange rubber duck that came with the hotel room on top of an old gas pump which was inside the restaurant. We have named this duck Yoder, after the surname ever-present in Amish country, and will take pictures of Yoder everywhere we go from here on out.

Tomorrow: a shorter driving day as we work our way to Minneapolis, where we're due to stay for a few days.]]> Sat, 18 May 2013 00:15:00 +0000