I’m in Bismarck, North Dakota tonight. Back in the United States after a fantastic trip “up north” to Canada. One of the main goals for today was to visit the land my Grandpa Arndt homesteaded back between 1905 and 1911 in extreme northwest North Dakota. And I achieved that goal…. mostly:
It appears to me looking at my track that Howard and I ended up several miles south of where we were supposed to be.
I wasn’t trusting the directions my GPS was producing, and so I had created a sheet of paper with directions written out. But that fell apart quickly when a supposed road we were were to take south ended up being a couple of dirt tracks covered with grass. Howard, of course, thought we should go down the road – Howard always thinks we should follow the dirt “road.” But I sent us back to the highway and followed the GPS’s suspect directions.
Looking back at the track now, I can see we were definitely too far south, But I don’t really feel too bad about it. We got to the right general area, and we still had a lot of traveling to do today.
Here I am, somewhere near where my dad’s dad’s homesteaded in the early 1900s.
Our second scheduled stop for the day was the northern unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It’s a gorgeous area of badlands filled with bison, big horn sheep, and other wild critters. After collecting our National Parks Stamp, we followed the scenic road about halfway through the park, where we stopped to take pictures.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park (North Unit)
Unfortunately, the storm clouds that had been chasing us since lunch in Williston, ND were starting to catch up, and so we decided the wisest course of action was to get back to traveling south and east – away from the storms.
This ended up being a really good call. We kept getting short bouts of rain dropping on us, but we managed to avoid a couple of pretty serious storm cells that would have been a mess to have been in. (No, I don’t have pictures – we kept moving!)
Tomorrow, Howard and I will be collecting several more National Park Stamps and returning to Kearney. I probably won’t have a final post for a day or two after that, but expect an epilog early next week sometime.