September 2, 2014 sunny & windy – 54 degrees
Welcome to North Dakota
I love to travel because there is always something new around the corner and Williston, ND was one of those surprises. It was a rough city with many large trucks and machines rumbling along dusty roads. There were flat wheat fields & farm equipment along the highways and a booming oil & gas industry.
Wheat Fields and Tractor
Oil trucks filled local roads and clogged highways along the road out of the city. Route 2 was lined with oil drill support companies, hastily built barracks for workmen, tank & silo companies, and John Deere tractor dealers.
Pumping for Oil
Oil Pump
Huge Oil Well
We passed many towns with interesting names: Palermo, Melville, Bergen, Pingree, and Buchanan as we drove along the 70 mph two-lane road.
Freight Train, Silos, Tractor
We stopped for lunch in Minot, ND where the server, Dimitri, was from Odessa, Ukraine. He said last winter had been really cold in Minot with temperatures reaching down to minus forty degrees for several days. He said it wasn’t too bad, but recently he was looking for a job in Florida.
North Dakota Route 2
Grain elevators, silos, and cell phone towers break up the vast horizon. For most of the day, our cell phones had 4/5 bars of AT&T service. That’s better than I get at home in New York!
Have a Bud With Your Ice Cream in Carrington, ND
Big Sky
We stopped for coffee in Jamestown, ND
We reached Fargo by 6:00 PM after being on the road for eight hours. We checked into a newly built Hilton Home-2-Suites and it felt good to get out of the car.
Sunset in Fargo, North Dakota