Today was another day of driving east on Hwy 14, a two lane road that crosses both South Dakota and Minnesota. The country side is wide open wild grassland and cultivated farmland. The further east we got the flatter the land became. At the South Dakota and Minnesota border we passed through the largest wind farm we have ever seen, there were electricity generating wind mills as far as we could see. We’ve passed many wind farms on this trip, but this is the largest we’ve seen, so far.
We passed thru several interesting small towns, one of them was the hometown of Laura Ingles Wilder, author of “Little house on the prairie.” Small town America as I imagine it was in the 40’s and 50’s, that’s the impression I got from the villages. Several have campsites in small town parks; we stopped and had lunch in one, drove thru a second but decided not to stay overnight and settled here in the town park at Springfield Minnesota.
As we were walking around the park we speculated on why the campground was full and everyone but us was from Minnesota. We think the most plausible explanation is these are folks who live out in the country on farms and other solitary locations. They all came camping in town to be around other people, a lot of them were gathered in groups socializing.
Another interesting theme I noticed in the towns we passed today is; if they had a dealership selling vehicles it was more often than not a farm equipment dealer not an auto dealer.
This morning we passed another milestone, we have driven over 8000 miles. We’re sure now that the entire trip will be over 10,000 miles. We originally naively guessed it would be a 6000 to 7000 mile trip.
No comments:
Post a Comment