We had to start the day at Anytime Fitness today because we ate Ben and Jerry's ice cream last night.  It was worth it! 











Today is going to be an incredible day!  We are in Jamestown, ND, and we are going to visit the National Buffalo Museum.  Two years ago when we were working on downsizing to sell our house, I did not know what to do with my buffalo collection.  David did some research online and discovered the museum here.  He suggested I contact the director to see about donating my collection to them so I did.  The director's name is Ilana Xinos and she responded to my email almost immediately.  She said they would love to receive my donation and that it would be the largest private donation they ever received.  We shipped eight boxes of buffalo things to the museum -- prints, pottery, jewelry, stuffed buffaloes, books, pillows, blankets and just about anything buffalo-related you can imagine.  I was thrilled to know that my treasured collection would go to a good home.  

When we started planning this road trip to Oregon, David suggested we visit the museum.  I thought it was too far out of the way but he insisted.  I'm so happy he did.  When we knew when we would arrive I emailed Ilana to see if she would be there and asked if I could meet her.  She said she would be at the museum, cleaning out the basement, and she would be delighted to meet me.  What a great meeting and visit!  She hesitated to have her picture taken because of being dirty from the basement but she agreed to it.  We also happened to meet Don, the President of the Board of the museum.  



Ilana told me that most of the items I donated were sold at their yearly fundraiser, a dinner and auction.  She also told me that she owns one of the things I donated, a red, white and blue throw that she uses daily and cuddles up with.  I told her I was very pleased she bid on it and now owns it because it was a gift from my Mom.  Now she loves it even more.  I'm just going to post my favorite pictures from the museum below.

After all of this excitement we stopped to eat an early dinner and returned back to our room for the night.  This is turning out to be a fantastic road trip!  Wonder what tomorrow will bring???  

Thursday morning in Fargo.  No hurry today.  We don't have to work out and we aren't driving too far today.  But we do have to have the oil changed in the car.  David talked to the front desk clerk about where to take the it and he recommended a dealership near by that had a "fast change lane."  After our usual stop at Starbucks for coffee and ice tea we drove to the dealership and got in line in the fast lane.  An employee came to the car and filled out the service request form and then escorted us inside to their lounge.  It had very comfortable chairs and some of the chairs had little writing tables attached (perfect for writing post cards on!).  She also told us they had warm, freshly baked cookies and fresh coffee for us.  You can also have a free bottle of water or a bottle of pop.  There were two little boys there with their Mom and one of the clerks called them over and gave them each a stuffed bear wearing a t-shirt with the dealership's logo on it.  So cute!  The people here could not have been any nicer.  I resisted the cookies as long as I could. 

That didn't take long and we started driving to Devils Lake.  Native Americans originally named it Spirit Lake which was then incorrectly translated to Bad Spirit Lake.  Because of the many legends of drowned warriors and lake monsters, the name evolved into Devils Lake.  It is the largest natural body of water in North Dakota.  It covers more than 200,000 acres and has hundreds of miles of shoreland.  It is a very popular fishing lake (ranked in the top five fishing lakes in the US) and in the Winter it draws a lot of people for ice fishing.  We were planning on going kayaking for a few hours.  It was a beautiful drive with miles and miles of farm land on either side of the highway.  When we arrived at the lake it was much too cold and windy for kayaking.  The lake actually had whitecaps on it!  And we are weenies so we had a nice lunch in the little town instead!  



We decided to drive on to Jamestown, ND.  On the way out of the town of Devils Lake we stopped at Fort Totten.  It is located within the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation and is the site of tribal headquarters.  It was built after the Civil War by the Army to protect settlers in the area.  Later it was adapted for use as an Indian boarding school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.  It is an interesting historic site and we enjoyed reading about the experiences of the Native Americans attending school there.  It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and one of the structures is used as a bed and breakfast and one is used as a community theater.  We were lucky to be there on a slow day and David was able to engage the historian there in a long conversation about being a member of the Dakota tribe.  You know you can read all the brochures and plaques in the world but nothing replaces conversations with knowledgeable people!  We had a great visit there.  Here are a few pictures we took there -- the historic marker, the school room and the general store.
































On to Jamestown!  We found our hotel and it was right next to Wal-Mart so we stopped in to buy some bottled water and breakfast bars to have before working out in the morning.  Now we are relaxing in our room watching TV.  

Tommorrow is a VERY exciting day and I can hardly wait!  Good night.  

Fargo, ND.  That's our destination today.  We weren't really in a hurry so we slept in a little bit.  We checked out about 9:15, loaded the car and stopped at Starbucks for coffee and ice tea.  While waiting for my coffee I realized I had left my Kindle at the hotel.  Oh nooooo.  I quickly called the hotel and the person said he couldn't find it in the room.  I was really worried but I thought it might be caught up in the sheets on the bed so we drove back to the hotel and, luckily, I found it in the bed.  As Gail said on FB, crisis averted!  

It was about a four hour drive to Fargo and it was an easy, pretty drive on a quiet Interstate and we enjoyed it.  Also, we had new entertainment in the car.  When we were at Johnny Ray's he convinced me to start using Prime music.  I have Amazon Prime and I just hadn't used that feature.  Tons and tons of individual songs and albums are free so you can download as much as you want.  At the Mall of America I bought a small speaker so the music sounds much better than just coming from the iPhone.  So even if you have an old car without Sirius radio you can still listen to great music in the car!  

We arrived in Fargo around 2:00 and went straight to Anytime Fitness.  The layout of the gym was really good and there was plenty of space for our workout.  Most of the equipment was Nautilus brand which we are not used to but we were able to find equipment to meet our needs.  After working out we met the manager, Alicia, the marketing director, Kaylee, and Shaun, the trainer.  We had so much fun talking to them and getting to know them.  We learned that the two men who own the Anytime Fitness we went to actually own 28 gyms.  Just look at how gorgeous all of them are!

David and I were planning on an early dinner so we asked Alicia and Kaylee for recommendations -- a local place, not a chain.  The first restaurant Alicia thought of was Mango's Mexican restaurant.  She also mentioned a few pubs and a restaurant that specializes in grilled cheese sandwiches!  Right up our alley!!!  We had a hard time choosing where to go but finally ended up at . . . Mango's.  The food was fresh and authentic and delicious.  We are very happy we decided to go there.  Besides, who can possibly make better grilled cheese sandwiches than my sister, Jill???

Alicia and Kaylee asked us where we were going next and we told them Devil's Lake.  Turns out that's where Alicia is from!  She told us it is a beautiful area and that we would love it.  She also recommended a restaurant there, The Ranch, where she used to work.  I'm sure we will try it.  

The three of them were delightful and we wished we could have taken them all with us on our trip!  After we wasted as much of their time as we could at the gym we went straight to Mango's, had dinner and then checked into our hotel.  

It's bedtime for us.  Good night!  

No working out today.  Yay!  Today was our movie day.  We decided to see Equalizer 2 with Denzel Washington at 1:00 -- that meant we would need to take the shuttle at Noon.  We had some time so we went to Starbucks for coffee and ice tea.  We feel like such hipsters hanging out at Starbucks with the cool kids!  Except that David was pouring over his road atlas while I'm sure the hipsters rely only on their iPhones for directions!

The Mall of America has a very cool theater with recliner seats and an entire "marketplace" from which to pick snacks.  We were surprised to find out it was $5.00 Tuesday so our movie was very cheap.  The snacks on the other hand . . . .  You would not believe what all there was to pick from.  Flavored popcorn, pizza, deli sandwiches, sushi, hamburgers, fries and milkshakes and every kind of candy you can imagine.  PLUS, there is a full bar there!  No, we did not have gin and tonics at the movies!!!  David just had plain old cheddar popcorn but I had the best french fries of my life with queso dip!  That's why I go to the gym.  Seriously, it was a huge portion of fries and they were delicious!  I should have taken pictures.  The movie was excellent!  I don't think Denzel Washington has made a bad movie, has he?  

Walking out of the cinema we spotted the Crayola Experience.  We didn't want to experience it but we did take pictures.

  

















The shuttle drove us back to the hotel and we spent the next little while re-packing and getting ready to leave tomorrow.  We started to get a little hungry but we didn't feel like going out to a restaurant so we walked across the street to Trader Joe's and bought wheat tortillas and chicken salad and egg salad and made wraps for dinner.  The chicken salad was great -- the kind with pecans and cranberries.  David said his egg salad was good too.  Just what we wanted.

Now we are ready for sleep before we drive to Fargo, ND tomorrow.  Sleep tight!

Had to work out this morning -- leg day, my least favorite!  But after that we returned to the hotel, showered, dressed and went down to the lobby to wait for the shuttle to take us to the Mall of America.  It wasn't far and we were very happy we didn't have to drive there and find a place to park.  If you look closely at the picture below, you can see me standing there with my yellow purse.  

The first store inside the area we entered was Anthropologie.  I love this store and they generally have the cutest skirts ever.  Of course when I went in, I didn't like any of the skirts!  But we really weren't there to shop, we were there to gawk.  

I have to say we were both impressed with the mall.  Yes, it's huge, but it is walkable.  It is very well lit and sooooooooo clean!  It has every store I love and lots I hadn't seen before.  Let me tell you about my exciting purchase!  A pair of white underwear!!!  You know I have a limited amount of clothes with me and one thing I have is a pair of white capris.  It seems like every time I want to wear them, the one pair of light-color underwear I have with me is in the wash!  TMI???

This place has a ton of things for kids -- Leggo Land, Nickelodeon Universe with thrill rides, a water park, an aquarium, adventure miniature golf, an amazing mirror maze and I'm sure many more things we did not see.  

People always talk about how crowded the mall is but we must have hit it on a slow day because the crowds did not bother us at all.  




When I walked by the Ulta store I realized my eyebrows needed waxed and the wax bar had no waiting so what the heck?  The waxer was so much fun.  Her name is Monae and she agreed to have her picture taken with me.  My eyebrows look great, don't you think?

When we had had enough we returned to our hotel.  We really needed to do some laundry so that's what we did.  Now we have lots of clean clothes.  Laundry makes us hungry so we then had the shuttle drive us to a nearby restaurant called Luna Di Luna, which was a fantastic (non-chain) Italian restaurant!  Just look!

We finished the meal with some absolutely delicious chocolate cheesecake!  Great day, great meal, good night!  

Slow morning this morning which was wonderful.  Before we left Waterloo, David wanted to see the John Deere Museum and it didn't open until Noon.  That gave us plenty of time to hang out at Starbucks, drink coffee and ice tea and read the newspaper.

Around Noon we went to the Museum and although I wasn't really interested in it, it was a very nice place.  It wasn't too large and the exhibits were very well done.  

 

This is a new, 2018 tractor that costs around a half a million dollars!  Can you even imagine?  It is gigantic, has two seats and is air conditioned.  It also has a computer in the cab.  Each wheel is one ton.  It was pretty impressive!

We finally had to tear ourselves away from tractors to drive towards Minneapolis -- really Bloomington, MN.  Guess where we were headed?  THE MALL OF AMERICA!  Can you believe I talked David into going there???

On the way we stopped in a small town called Owatonna to see the "Village of Yesteryear."  It was a village of 15 structures reminiscent of the 1800s.  The main house is the Dunnell Mansion built in 1868.  It is beautiful!

After driving all day on beautiful state and county roads we had to get on the Interstate for the last leg of our trip to Bloomington.  Of course there was a lot of roadwork going on so it was slow going and we were even stopped in traffic for about an hour.  But now we are in our room planning our day tomorrow at the Mall of America.  This hotel provides shuttle service to the Mall so we will take advantage of that.  Truth be told David will probably last about an hour shopping at the Mall and will then go to the cinema there which has recliner seats and food delivery to your seat.  

Today was the most beautiful day of driving.  We started out in Mount Vernon, Illinois, drove through Missouri, and ended up in Waterloo, Iowa. David planned the route to drive very little on interstates, mostly on state roads, and the scenery was so beautiful!  We encountered some traffic driving through St. Louis but it was cool to see the Gateway Arch.  

We drove for about three hours and then stopped in Columbia, Missouri to work out at Anytime Fitness.  It is a small gym but it had the equipment we needed and it wasn't too busy.  We met a very nice guy there named Kendall.
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We decided it was time for lunch after working out so we asked Kendall where we should go close by.  He recommended Crushed Red which he said is a chain but we had never heard of it before.  They have chopped salads, soup, flat breads, etc.  The salads were fantastic!

The next few hours David drove through the most beautiful farming communities!  Acres and acres of corn, soy, wheat and I don't know what else.  We enjoyed the slow pace of driving on the state roads with very little traffic.  

Around Bloomfield, Iowa we saw signs that said "Share the Road" and showed a picture of a horse and buggy.  Soon we saw a few and realized we were passing through an Amish community. 

Shortly after seeing them we saw a huge General Store and there were many buggies and cars there so we decided to stop and look around.  The store gives away free soft-serve ice cream cones so there were lots of kids hanging around that machine!  The variety of things for sale here was amazing.  Clothes, shoes, household goods, food of all kinds, many, many kinds of candy and locally made cheese, ham salad, cole slaw and other good things!  On the second floor there was beautiful hand-made wood furniture.  Incredible farm house style tables and chairs and beds and dressers.  All Amish made and the craftsmanship was stunning.  Believe it or not, we did not buy anything nor did we have free ice cream!

On the way out of the store we saw these gorgeous porch/deck chairs for sale.  Aren't they cool?

After that stop we drove on through to Waterloo!  And now we are checked into our hotel and about ready to turn off the light and go to sleep.  I know it sounds trite but we live in the most beautiful country and we love that we are getting to see so much of it!