Chapter 3: This Place Is The Wurst.
I had forgotten to post one of my favorite photos of Lake Bemidji from the previous night, so here’s a bonus photo for you:
Friday morning, June 24. It was a beautiful day in Bemidji. We were up early, because nobody sleeps in on vacation, right? Also, we’d bought a couple of air mattresses to help the kids sleeping on the floor have a better night, but it had backfired because we’d put Drew on one of them and he’d had a horrible night and kept climbing into bed with us. Thankfully, coffee was in plentiful supply at the hotel breakfast.
We drove into town because Julie wanted something to commemorate her visit to Bemidji—namely, a t-shirt with “Bemidji” printed on it. Not only is the word fun to say, but the town had also featured in one of our favorite current TV shows,
“Fargo” on FX. And no, obviously the show doesn’t entirely take place in Fargo.
We figured the easiest place to accomplish Julie’s Bemidji t-shirt dream was at the bookstore on the campus of
Bemidji State University. So we found the campus, right on the lake in town, and wandered a bit. I took a photo of the gate because it reminded me of Monsters University.
We found the bookstore and got Julie’s prized t-shirt. I also grabbed a coffee mug, because I wanted to be able to confirm my friends’ suspicions that I have, indeed, been to B.S. University.
We set out on our drive, leaving Bemidji in our rear-view mirror.
Whenever we travel, our general strategy is to fly into some city, rent a van, and then drive a big loop starting and ending in that city while trying to see as many points of interest along the way as we can. There are typically a few days along the way in which we have to do a lot of driving in order to re-position ourselves for the next sightseeing location. On those long driving days, I look for ways to break up the drives so that we’re not stuck in the car for too many hours at a time. Sometimes, I’m successful. Sometimes, we pray the DVD player doesn’t break down.
In this case, the best stop I could find came early on in the drive. We drove to the north entrance of
Lake Itasca State Park. This is Minnesota’s oldest state park, having been established way back in 1891. This lake forms the headwaters of the Mississippi River, which flows 2,350 miles from this point south before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana.
(Note: the state park itself claims the length of the Mississippi is 2,552 miles. Wikipedia says 2,320. The National Park Service says 2,350—that’s the number I went with. If any of you wants to take a float trip and measure it accurately, just let me know your results and I’ll update the chapter.)
Upon entering the park, we were immediately put on alert by the elaborate warning system.
From the north entrance, you take a short drive to a visitor center with some small exhibits about the river. There’s a short walking path that leads you to the lake and the headwaters of the river. It wasn’t long before we were here:
It’s a nice, quiet spot, and several people were taking the opportunity to wade in the Mississippi on a hot summer day. We thought that sounded like a good idea. Behold the Mighty Mississippi River!
It’s kind of neat to be able to say you crossed the Mississippi River on a log bridge.
The big kids decided to wade back across on the rocks.
Drew and I opted for the safer route.
The visitor center took its cues from Disney World and included a gift shop, which always draws us touristy types in like a magnet. Not much to see in there, although I did start to worry Julie would start to get some bad ideas.
We got back on the road, twisting our way through the back roads of Minnesota. Eventually, the roads got bigger and right about at lunch time, we crossed the border of our second new state of the trip.
We were in Fargo, North Dakota. Try to contain your enthusiasm.
One of our other tricks to break up long drives is to forego the standard peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch and eat out somewhere instead. After a few days of those sandwiches, even McDonald’s will start to look appealing. But we had something much better in mind here.
Way back in the planning stages of this trip, I’d been scanning Google Maps (this is how I plan my route). I was planning the drive from Bemidji across North Dakota and saw that we’d be passing through Fargo (another landmark for fans of the show). A casual glance to the north revealed that the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada) lay directly to the north. I guess my Canadian geography was rusty, because I had thought Winnipeg was further to the west. Of course, when you live on the east coast, everything is further west. Anyway, this was important because Winnipeg is the home of the world-renowned DISBoard Trip Reporter Supreme,
@pkondz .
So I sent him a message to tell him we were (sort of) going to be in the area. He jumped on the chance to meet up right away, suggesting a place in Fargo that he and his family had visited before and enjoyed. Sounded great to me! But as I looked at the map, I ran the numbers and saw that it was a 3-hour drive from Winnipeg to Fargo (one way). So poor pkondz would be driving six hours just to eat lunch with us. That’s far above and beyond the call of duty, but to his immense credit, he was willing to do it.
He also said his daughter was willing to travel to the ends of the earth to eat spaetzle, so that helped with the decision.
We both tried to make Winnipeg fit into the itinerary so he didn’t have to go so far, but no matter what routes I tried, I couldn’t make it work. Any way I sliced it, it would add hundreds of miles and 2 extra days of travel to what was already a 3,600-mile road trip—the longest we’d ever attempted as a family, with a 2-year-old tagging along. I was already worried about how Drew would hold up through all this driving, and thought adding more would be biting off more than we could chew. So we settled on Fargo. Knowing that pkondz’s work schedule can change on the fly, we hoped things would work out so we could meet for lunch.
In the end, his work schedule wasn’t the problem. As we got closer to the trip, he checked to confirm the date and realized he had a conflict—a friend’s daughter was graduating that day, and he had agreed to photograph the ceremony for them. So, rather than take the simple step of having the school cancel or re-schedule the ceremony and driving six hours to meet a stranger, he took the easy way out and kept his promise to his friend. Thanks a lot, pkondz. I see where I rate.
We were both bummed we couldn’t make it work. At that point, I had already made all of my reservations and the travel dates were set; some of them were paid in advance and would not have been eligible for a refund if I’d cancelled them. So we just had to chalk it up as a missed opportunity.
I really wish it could have happened. As most of you know, pkondz is one of the most entertaining writers on this site, as well as perhaps the funniest. I’ve greatly enjoyed getting to know him as I’ve read his TR’s, and I think would have had a blast meeting him and his family over lunch while they checked their watches repeatedly wondering how much longer they had to spend with these idiots. I hope one day we do get to meet up. Surely we’ll be back in Fargo many times over the coming years.
Ok, maybe not. And stop calling me Shirley. Anyway, we’ll figure it out.
Pkondz still helped our trip immensely, because we went with his recommendation for lunch:
The Wurst Bier Hall in Fargo.
This place specializes in German dishes, especially sausages (hence the name). As if that wasn’t enough, pkondz highly recommended the house root beer on draft. Well, that sounded delicious. So we all got root beers, and raised a glass in spirit to our missing DIS-friend.
This place was the gift that kept on giving. And no, I don’t mean they had a Jelly-of-the-Month Club. Not only was it a haven for Dad Jokes…
But I looked at the appetizers on the menu, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but:
What? No, why would I want a cold spinach dip?
They had a bacon flight! There is absolutely positively no way I am not ordering that. I’m going to post a photo of this glorious dish, but please be warned: you may be overcome by pure, unadulterated joy. Imagine tasting it, and feeling an overwhelming, sublime transcendence that brings the strongest of us to tears as we ponder the existence of something so beautiful and perfect. I am also required by law to include musical accompaniment worthy of the dish.
I humbly present the Bacon Flight:
There was almost a fighting match over the tray, and in the end we had to split the dish six ways, which of course results in everyone getting not enough bacon. I wish I had the budget to buy everyone appetizers at $5 a pop, but that adds up quickly with a large family. In any case, I liked the brown sugar bacon. Julie adores pepper bacon, so that was her favorite. But I also liked regular ol’ hickory-smoked bacon, because really—does bacon ever need any improvement?
The answer is no.
For lunch, we figured if the place specialized in German sausages, we might as well give them a shot. So everyone got a different kind of sausage. I can’t remember what everyone ordered, but Julie got a Hawaiian, I got a regular bratwurst (with onions and bbq sauce) and Dave shocked us all by ordering a Philly cheesesteak sausage.
We passed around bites of everyone’s sandwiches and they were uniformly terrific. Even the cheesesteak sausage. They also had various dipping sauces for the fries, and Sarah fell in love with the chipotle ranch, practically drinking it out of the container. It should be no surprise, then, that we are awarding the Wurst Bier Hall our best prize, the Drooling Homer Award for Unpretentious Dining. Pkondz, thanks a million for steering us to this place. Now, let’s figure out a way to make this meet happen! When will you next be in Delaware?
In most of my trip report chapters, I break up the day into halves because there’s generally enough material in half a day to fill a standard chapter. But in this case, I’m going to plow ahead. Why?
After lunch, we had to drive across North Dakota. I apologize. There is no way to make this interesting. J.K. Rowling could not make this drive interesting. My favorite travel writer, Bill Bryson, could not make this drive interesting. Steven Spielberg would struggle to make this drive interesting, even if he were allowed to add UFO’s and exploding helicopters (although they would help). The drive across North Dakota involves hours and hours of this:
The shoes are not there to make the photo interesting, they’re just in the redneck dryer after having taken a dip in the Mississippi earlier in the day.
We just tried to blast through the state as fast as we could while Drew took his afternoon nap in the back seat. On the plus side, the speed limit on the interstate is 80 mph. Here ends the plus side.
My father once attended a national conference of highway engineers. They had representatives from each state introduce themselves to the room, and asked them to add a little tidbit about their home state. When it was time for the North Dakota representative to introduce himself, he stood and said, “North Dakota is so flat, it’s possible to stand on top of a beer can at one end of the state and see clear across the other side.”
Later, the New Hampshire representative stood and said, “The highest point in New Hampshire is Mt. Washington, at an elevation of 6,289 feet. On an especially clear day, you can look way out to the west…and see some idiot standing on a beer can in North Dakota.”
You might also be able to see a statue of a giant cow.
Or whatever this thing is:
The only real highlight was that occasionally we’d see a field covered in yellow wildflowers, which nicely broke up all of the browns and greens.
We continued on through four long hours of that. I’ve never been in the Sahara Desert, but I’ve heard stories of weary travelers mounting a ridge and stumbling upon an oasis. I imagine that was the same feeling we had when we climbed a hill and saw the capital city of Bismarck before us. Not that there was anything special about Bismarck, but trees, billboards, and Mobil gas station signs at least gave us something different to see.
We finally made it to the town of Dickinson, which was our stop for the night and where we deployed another road trip strategy: the Pizza and Pool Party ®. After a long day of boring drives, sometimes the last thing you want to do is get back in the car and hunt for a place to eat. Also, with four kids cooped up in the van all day, they need to let some pent-up energy out. So we’ll just call Domino’s or whatever the local equivalent is, order pizza to the room, and send the kids to the pool. In this case, I’d found a
Holiday Inn Express just off the highway that had a big 3-story waterslide. Win.
That slide was fun--eventually. It went outside the building and then at the point where you re-entered the building there was a sharp turn. We always hit that turn with such speed that there was a loud crash below and some water would splash down into the pool. We quickly learned to have our shoulders braced for impact, or else it would be taken by the head. But once we figured that out, it was a good time.
We put Drew in a bed at night for the rest of the trip, which worked much better. That meant two of the big kids were stuck with the floor. But hey, at least they had air mattresses.
Coming Up Next: Five days in, and we start to see some actual sights!
Even I wasn't willing to go that far over the top. I mean, you can only suspend disbelief so far.
The only time you should see 1:30 a.m. is if you've had a really, really fun night. That wasn't it.
I really don't mind driving to work at 6am. Zero traffic.
That's great!
Still not happy about that.
