August 19--Jamestown, ND to Sibley Lake State Park, MN

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Friday, August 19, 2011 Wal-Mart parking lot in Jamestown, ND. 64 degrees and rainy at 9:30. Starting mileage is 15,902

Bypassed Fargo, ND on Interstate 94 and crossed over the Red River into Minnesota. Stopped to get literature at the Welcome Center as we had had it driving on the Interstate and also wanted to see what events might be going on in this state. The gentleman manning the desk suggested going through the town of New Ulm on route 15 that was built by German immigrants. We also picked up a brochure on US wildlife refuges and prairie land owned by the Nature Consortium. Plotted our way to see a list of the refuges using the new detailed map of Minnesota that showed the small farm roads as well as county and state roads.

A sign at the front of the Welcome Center suggested that Minnesota can be thought of as being "ruled" by two giants---Paul Bunyan in the forests and lumbering industry of the north and the Jolly Green giant in the farms of the south. It is hard for us to give you an idea of the vast size of the farm land we have traveled through since we left the Rocky Mountains --wheat, corn and soybeans for miles, and miles, and miles. Now we were seeing fields of sugar beets and sunflowers along with the corn and soybeans. Wheat fields left off basically in western North Dakota.

We left Interstate 94 a miles into Minnesota at the town Barnsville, and drove onto county roads. There we discovered a huge statue of a prairie chicken in a kind of rest stop area. We would really like to see real ones that are supposed to be plentiful in this area. We found several of the set aside wild prairie grasslands but, there was nothing in the them but grasses and weeds to our "untrained" eyes and no real places to park to walk out into them if we wanted to. We did see grebes, ducks, egrets, hawks, and pelicans in the too numerous to count lakes/ponds/wetlands. We were so far off the beaten path immersed in farm land on all sides, that as we turned Rosie onto a gravel county road in front of a farmer in his pick-up truck, stopped at the intersection, he rolled down his window and asked us if we were lost. We assured him we were ok and were just checking out some of the wildlife refuges.

This whole state has been scoured by glaciers leaving lakes/ponds/wetlands/and puddles in every depression of the land. Some are small like a farm pond but, many are huge lakes. At Elbow Lake on highway 59, we bought 10 gals of ethanol at $3.149 per gal for a total of $31.53. Rosie II is set up to run on ethanol and we wanted to give it a try since it is so much cheaper than regular gas.

When we reached the community of 740 citizens in Belgrade, after our wanderings, we came upon a large, 43 foot high fiberglass crow, sitting on a 31 foot long branch, on top of a 25 foot long cement pedestal set up in an memorial park. What is it with people around here????---a cow, a prairie chicken and now a crow!!! I guess the crow is symbolic here, as the town is on the Crow River, however, I am not sure what it has to do with the memorial park where vets and other significant town people have their names listed on bricks that form the walls around a square. Flags of all the states and some foreign counties where people in this area immigrated from also fly around the square. Not really a very cohesive themed memorial, as far as we were concerned.

We are now seeing huge turkey operations as big as the chicken farms in North Georgia with 5-6 long turkey sheds per farm. We are also paralleling the railroad tracks and are seeing a number of very long Canadian National Railroad trains. What are they doing in the US?? and what are they hauling?? grains?? coal??

Made our way to Sibley Lake State Park for the night. As we turned into the park we saw 5 wild turkeys by the road---good way to get themselves killed!! Guess people are getting one last camping trip in before the kids start school as, the campground directly on the lake is crowded and the campground on the hill, where we settled in, had lots of campers---course, it is Friday. Some of these State Parks are expensive---this one was when you added taxes on top of the fee. Chose not to hook up and saved $5. Cool enough in the trees to sleep tonight.

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