Day 12 of our trip found us traveling west on Highway 2, through the upper half of North Dakota. As I mentioned before, our goal was to make it Grandpa Larry's farm in Montana before night, but as we battled stronger and stronger winds that day, we soon realized we could go no further. As we saw gusts over 70 miles per hour, and heard of trucks and trailers being flipped on there sides, we finally decided to stop in Minot for the night. After an exhausting and worrisome day of travel, fighting the wind and only able to go around 40 miles and hour all day, we had to find a place to pull the trailer into for the night. Lets just say that's a difficult thing to do in Minot, North Dakota! Anyway, after lots of calling and asking around, we were able to find a place to park for the night at the Minot State Fairgrounds. The fairground officials where very kind and good to us!
After we got our trailer unhitched, we found a Perkins to eat at for supper. Can you sense our relief in the picture above? Then we walked around at the mall a while, and ran into Randy's cousin Lyle who farms in the area. It was another unexpected but welcomed highlight to talk to him! Then we went back to our trailer and spent the rest of the night snuggled up as the wind ripped and tore at the world outside our little home on wheels...
Randy is probably talking to Grandpa Larry as the wind rocked the trailer back and forth...
And here we are the next morning, getting ready to go again! As we left the camping area, we saw many blown over trees and branches. We even had to weave our way through some of them. But We survived!!! It was still pretty windy but much less than the day before...
Minot is well inside the borders of the Bakken Oil Patch, likely the reason it was so difficult to find a place to stay the night there. As we got on the road again, and moved further and further west, we saw more and more oil activity. Even though things have slowed down there, in the last year, there was still a LOT going on when we came through that day...
Our first look at man camps...
We tried to count oil wells but soon lost count. We saw hundreds and hundreds just from the highway...
We'd heard a lot over the last ten years about "The Bakken" and the Oil Boom in North Dakota. But like I mentioned before, it had been at least 10 years since our last North Dakota trip, so we hadn't seen anything of it for ourselves. It really was quite something and although I didn't take many pictures of it, I still felt like it was something I had to share in a post. It was kind of sad to see the difference from what I remember North Dakota to be, especially the Williston area. Anyway, we were very thankful to get through it all safely and on to our next destination...
Grandpa Larry's Farm! :)
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