Mac
The previous day could be best summarized as bugs, wind and heat!
Hoping for less wind than yesterday’s Montana adventure we got up early. Actually, one of the guys in the posse (and you won’t believe this), wakes up minutes prior to the time of the alarm! As if he has some subconscious alarm clock telling him it’s time to go.
At any rate, we were greeted with even more wind than the previous day which meant full-face helmets to provide some relief from the 30MPH sustained, gusting to 40MPH “breeze.” The weather service issued a wind advisory across the entire NoDak state…like we didn’t notice!
NoDak Farmland
US Highway 2 runs east-west through the northern side of NoDak and Interstate 94 runs east-west through the southern side of state. Interstate 29 runs north-south on the eastern edge of the state. We made a mid-course change in our plans and decided to drop down and take one of only two major roads in North Dakota which runs diagonal (northwest-southeast) through the state — US Highway 52.
US 52 provides an ever changing mix of agricultural farm and pasture land, native wetlands, and small lakes set on rolling landscape, but the wind was howling and made for wicked motrcycle driving! Tolerable as long as we headed directly into the gusts, but on US 52 we were often diagonal to the wind direction and it was interesting riding having to compensate. All day I couldn’t help but wonder when are they going to turn North Dakota into one big-ass wind farm…
Farm
We picked up Interstate 94 east at Jamestown. Louis L’Amour, the western novelist, and Darin Erstad, the pro baseball player in the 2002 World Champion Anaheim Angels, are both natives. In my “fun fact” search of NoDak tidbits I ran across this little video of some dude’s cam-cording the NoDak landscape from his pickup truck while driving across I-94…and listening to some kind of Scottish music. Can you spell F-U-N?!
About an hour later we arrived in Fargo. Fargo is the largest city in North Dakota and situated on the Red River. It’s the place people most relate to in the Coen Brothers movie starring Oscar-winner Frances McDormand and William H. Macy.
10,000 Lakes
Another 3 hours of wind-whip-lash we were approaching the Twin Cities (St. Paul and Minneapolis). It’s hard to determine which city you are actually in. There is no visible dividing line; the cities really do blend into one another. Minneapolis is an all American city, the people are chill, there’s no east coast ‘tude, and there’s water everywhere…a great vibe. The best part of the day was that we’d seen the wind drop off significantly and the end of a 500 mile day came to a close.
Interested to know more about our “Ride Home”? Read the road blogs for: Day 1HERE, Day 2 HERE, Day 3 HERE, Day 4 HERE and Day 5 HERE.
Northwest Harley Blog 