On the Way to JamestownJul 22, 2009
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Abandoned Farmstead
Farmhouse
Sagging Barn
The next several days will be transit days as we leave ND and get into Minnesota. We plan to stop in the Twin Cities area for a couple of days to visit our old home and Kyle’s birthplace. Along the way, we stopped at an abandoned farmstead. These are quite common along the route we’ve taken through the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana. If I had stopped at each one we probably would’ve taken at least 3 months to get through those states. I’m sure there’s an interesting story behind many of them. It’s good to see that some of the local museums that we visited are preserving some of those stories.
We arrived in Jamestown, ND tonight for an overnight stay. If you have a Garmin GPS and you travel this part of the country, be skeptical of the routes it leads you on. As we got close to the campground, it directed us on to a gravel road for 3 miles. Not a problem as it’s not the first gravel road we’ve traveled on this trip. If you know anything about how roads are laid out in the Midwest and west, you’ll know that there are only 2 crossroads in the 3 mile stretch. About a mile in, the gravel road turns into a dirt road in between corn and soybean fields (you can see the picture through the windshield). I’m glad it wasn’t raining or hadn’t rained in the last couple of days or this road would have been slipperier than snot. We figured we would try to turn off at the first crossroad after about a mile. We come up to the road that the GPS shows is there, and there is only a cow path going in either direction. By the way the road is only one lane and we were praying we didn’t run into a tractor or combine coming the other way. That would have been an awkward situation since I can’t back up with the car in tow. I wish I could have gotten a picture of Winnie in the corn field. We finally got to the next crossroad and it was gravel. We turned and the GPS is shouting “recalculating”. I look at the route it recalculated and it took us around the section and onto the same dirt road we just got off. So much for Garmin. We finally got onto the road to the campsite, another gravel road that somebody forgot to remove the washboard from. It took us about 15 minutes to go a mile. Both Winnie and the Equinox are covered with dust and looking pretty bad. We need to find a truck wash so we can spruce up a bit.
