road trip: Day 4- Nov. 8th - Beautiful North Dakota

Ya sure ya betcha now. Dat'l be turty tree dollars, please. LOL :) Welcome to North Dakota!!!

I made quick work of North Dakota today. I started in Glendive, MT and am now about 15 miles west of Fargo. It was a beautiful day full of blue skies and sun. It was probably 55 degrees! I crossed the 1000 mile marker today!! YEA!! The journey is in full bloom.

The color of the day is orange! Not just any orange, but bright orange. It is like a hunting festival around here. The testosterone is exploding from every pickup. The guys have quite the macho way of carrying themselves as they swagger from their truck to the gas station mini mart, and it's even more noticeable if they have a dead deer in the back of their truck. Aren't guys great!! :) I love it! :)

While I'm on the subject of country folk, I came across this little town called Medora, ND. Felt like I was on cowboy lane. Except this time of year, all the cowboys were gone :(

Just before I got to Medora, this was view from the freeway looking east towards the North Dakota badlands. I was at a view point just east of the Montana/North Dakota state line.

Not far past the view point was a sign for Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Hmmm... Where we live, a state park has trails and mountains and rivers. What could a state park out here have other than rattle snakes, dirt and rocks?

Oh, let me tell you, some pretty cool stuff. I saw Bison, prairie dogs, hills that were made of red stone and other hills that were unlike anything I had seen. I would like to go back and spend more time there. I couldn't get any pictures of the Bison because they were behind so much tall grass, but I did watch them.

Here is one of the hillsides in the park. Just amazing!!

Here puppy, puppy... oh wait, rodent, rodent... What the heck is a prairie dog? Pretty darn cute, I'd say. I sat and watched these little creatures for about a half hour. So fascinating!!! They squeaked and ran from hole to hole. There seems to be no distinct hole they belong to. They would switch constantly. Then as a car drove up the road, they would all come to attention and perch on top of their mounds with their little feet up against their chest and make this little high pitch chattering noise to alert the others.

Now, that's what I call fat and happy!!!

This was the rock hill that overlooked the prairie dogs. Very fitting, wouldn't you say?

After leaving the fun park with all the prairie dogs, I made my way east on I-94 towards Fargo. Then, I came across this unusual sculpture.

Now, this is a man with a lot of time on his hands!!! The guy who created this, created 7 sculptures that he erected along a 32-mile stretch of highway from just east of Dickinson, ND to Regent, ND. I only saw two of them because I had already spent so much time playing with the prairie dogs and wanted to stop at a decent hour tonight.

This one is called "Geese in Flight" and was erected in 2001. It is the largest scrap metal sculpture in the world. It weighs 75 tons and is 156 feet tall.

This was the second sculpture, which is called "The Deer Family." It was erected in 2002 and was made form old oil well tanks cut apart and welded together to form the deer. The buck is 75 feet tall and the doe is 50 feet tall.