Almost

August 21, 2009
Interesting day. Good thing we got the wipers replaced on the truck. We were driving across Pennsylvania and entered a fog area—lots of hills and valleys around. The sky was dark. Before long, it was like night. It was only 10 in the morning, but the sky looked like it was nine at night. The rain started. Then it poured. It was coming down in sheets! We were on this narrow bit of road with two lanes and a very small shoulder area. Bill was getting extremely nervous because he could not see—a minor detail when one is driving! We knew that pulling over would not be safe, so he kept his eyes glued to the lights on the truck in front of him and kept us moving forward, trying to ignore all of the people passing us on the left. It didn't last long, but it was a stressful few minutes! He had those new wipers going as fast as they would go and it still wasn't fast enough. Still, if we'd had the old wipers they would've been flung from the truck and into a valley or something.
We got to our destination and were sorely disappointed. We knew there would be bad weather, so we were looking for a motel room that was along interstate 80.


The night before—in Streetsboro—we watched as more tornado warnings were issued. One was for the county we were in. I had to look at the phone book to find out what county we were in, and sure enough, the funnel cloud or whatever it was passed about 10 miles to the south of us. So we wanted some shelter. We searched and searched with our atlas in hand, but could not find anyplace that would take a reservation. Finally we found a Red Roof Inn in Danville, PA that had a room available, so we booked that. It was a somewhat longer drive than we'd been making in a day and we were somewhat nervous about this because of the clanging and clunking noises the truck is making (Bill did some research and thinks it's the U-joint). Anyway, there seemed to be little choice, so we reached Danville, found the motel and proceeded to check in. The room itself was nice enough—clean and comfortable. But the free coffeehouse style whole bean coffee that they trumpeted all over their website was unavailable because the machine was broken. There was no internet connection available. I was in desperate need of coffee. So after bringing our stuff in and laying down for awhile, Bill asked the woman at the desk where the nearest grocery store was. It was right down the road a couple of miles, she said, so we got into the clanging truck and headed that way. It was there.

I love walking around new grocery stores. You can tell a lot about where you are by observing what kind of food they sell and do not sell. I find it fascinating. On this day, my mind was pretty foggy, though, so I kind of stood there feeling overwhelmed as I tried to figure out what to buy for supper. By this time I had found the coffee and purchased a 20 ounce cup. It wasn't great, but it was good enough, and I was grateful. So while I waited for that to kick in, I kind of wandered around looking at stuff.

Then I spotted the pizza in the hot food case. It looked almost like New Jersey pizza, which seemed reasonable, since I was almost in New Jersey! I had been looking forward to NJ pizza for a long time. There's something about it that's different from west coast pizza. Anyway, I looked up at the sign and saw that they sold whole pies. I knew what I wanted for dinner. So Bill ordered some and we went outside to drink our coffee while we waited. Bill decided he didn't like it, so he gave me most of his 20 ounce cup, too. I was feeling much better. We went back to the room and I tried the pizza. It was almost NJ pizza. The crust was a tad too thick, but it tasted wonderful! And we even have some left over for breakfast tomorrow!

Heritage and Tradition

July 22, 2009
I am sitting here by the pool. No one is in it yet. We had to meander around this morning looking for a place where the wifi connection would work and Bill could see his computer screen. The connection doesn’t work at our campsite--too many trees, maybe. But there are a couple of different places here where we can sit and plug in when we need to charge the battery, so that’s good.

Yesterday we went to the North Dakota Heritage Center. It’s a museum with a permanent exhibit that traces ND prehistory and history. And they have rotating exhibits in a different part of the building. It’s on the Capitol Grounds and is free. It’s very well done. We spent quite awhile in there. They had fossils, artifacts, replicas, old photographs and film, and even a few old crocheted things J The bathroom had collages of ads pertaining to bathroom things grouped by decade. That was fun to look at. The rotating exhibit was about the atomic bomb and the North Dakota connection. They had Minuteman missiles in Minot (about 120 miles north of here). The people were not in favor at first, but then for economic and patriotic reasons, they decided it was OK, even though they knew that they would not survive any kind of nuclear war! Remember that old song, “The Things We Do For Love?” Maybe we should update that to, “The Things We Do For Cash.” There was a place where they had sticky notes and a pencil for people to write their thoughts. Someone wrote that “the collective ability to delude ourselves is astonishing” or something like that. Amen.

I was getting a little foggy by the time we left. I practically live on coffee in the summer and the instant we have becomes a bit hard to swallow after awhile. We needed ice for the cooler and found a grocery store where they had a big cup of coffee for 59 cents (tax included). But we wanted a better system for coffee so we could make it at the campsite. We looked at a percolator for the camp stove, but it was small. We found a little individual cup filter for the princely sum of $15! Then I saw the strainer. You know, one of those things that you set on top of your cup or whatever. $1.99. Coffee filters on sale for 99 cents. So for $3 I solved my coffee problem. It’s my own version of a drip coffeemaker. That coffee tasted good this morning! Bill was laughing at me. However, I do think he also appreciates the new system because it means he does not have a crazy, cranky, coffee-deprived wife to drag around Bismarck J
We’re staying at another KOA kampground. As you may remember, they like to use the letter K a lot. At this particular kampground, the have a kookout on Friday and Saturday nights--ribs, chicken, hot dogs, and stuff like that. There are flyers everywhere, even on the door of the bathroom stalls. I don’t know about this. Everytime I see it, I think kook-out. Doesn’t seem very appealing somehow.

The people that own this campground have some horses in a field next to it. It was very peaceful watching them yesterday. There’s a little dog who rides around on the golf cart with the guy and he was herding the horses. Kind of amazing that such a little dog can get the horses to move so fast in exactly the direction he wants them to go! One of the horses had a great deal to say yesterday. The others were pretty quiet. I think there are 5 of them.
Bill was commenting yesterday that there doesn’t seem to be an actual city center here. There may be one and we just haven’t found it yet. But there does seem to be a bit of sprawl. Of course, Bismarck and Mandan are two different cities that seem to kind of blend in with one another. It is interesting to see how Bismarck plays on the Native American heritage and uses it as a tourist attraction. And it is a part of the state’s history. In Hardin, there was none of that. This fits right in with the tendency to glorify native cultures of the past and to ignore what is happening today. There is a romantic idea about “Indians” that involves not looking at individual cultures, but sort of collapsing everything into a Dances with Wolves kind of picture. It’s all about the Sioux 150 years ago. Native cultures as they are today are ignored or dismissed. This is a part of the identity problem I talked about a couple of days ago. It seems that for too many people--including some Native people themselves--the only way to be a true Native American is to do things in the “traditional” way. But “traditional” is a useless term. What does it mean? It means people pick some arbitrary time period and freeze it to make the argument that THIS is the true cultural picture. Native people don’t go to Harvard, they dress in animal skins and commune with nature or something. It’s pretty offensive. I mean, who among us lives the way our ancestors did 150 years ago? Why should any group of people be expected to do that? So in this part of North Dakota, they can play the Indian card to help with the tourism. Because there is no reservation or anything here which would bring people into contact with the current situation, it is easier to play on that glorified past. This is a big contrast with Hardin, where the current terrible situation is on display as you walk downtown.