North Dakota, Minnesota

It was 45 degrees when I woke up in Bismarck, North Dakota.   By the time I left, which was within a couple of hours of waking up, the winter storm of the season was fast approaching and the temperature had dropped down to 39 degrees!   I’m grateful for my Airbnb host, Pat, who advised that I should reconsider staying in Bismarck for a couple of nights as the storm was predicting 8-12 inches by the time I would be leaving on Thursday morning.

I took her advice, left early Wednesday morning and punched thru the weather as I left North Dakota and entered Minnesota, the storm was literally on my tail and I was driving as fast as I could to run from it!   Good times.

On my way to Minneapolis, I took a side trip to the city of Fergus Falls.   After buying some chocolate from a kids fund raising chocolate stand and talking to her local mom, I decided to spend some time at this quaint town of Minnesota.   She told me I had to visit this paper store that had been in the area for 100 plus years and expanded into an old bank with cool vaults (I’m a sucker for seeing old time banks and old vaults) so I did exactly what she recommended.   As I was shopping around and checking out the place I found this ‘take one mini map’ titled ‘Take a 25-minute walk to… The River Walk’… to make a long story short… that 25-minute walk turned into almost 2.5 hours by the time I spent time hanging out at the cool spots, talking to more locals and listening to their stories, and finally finishing up at a local café to eat dinner before I headed out to my final destination for the night.  This trip is for sure all about the journey and not about the destinations.  I’m so enjoying taking these little side-trips as I travel across America.   : )