This trip has been a long time coming.
My mom has been to almost all 50 states. There are about 5 left. A few years ago, realizing this, we sketched out a plan for a trip through the Dakotas, which would check two more off the list. This would have been about 2017 or 2018 - and we never quite got around to executing that plan. Until now.
We will be seeing the highlights of the two Dakotas over about a week and a half, and getting them well and truly explored. We begin in Fargo, the largest city in North Dakota at around 120K people, where we flew in and spent our first night.
Not exactly a metropolis, but for this part of the country, it's sizeable. We began with lunch at NoBull, a barbecue place, which offered waffles as a side item:
Yeah, I took a picture of my food. I don't make a habit out of it.
We had a shared family Google Sheet for the planning of this trip, and color coded things that were "can't miss" in green, "if there's time" in yellow, and "only if there's nothing else" in red. The first green thing on the list was the Art Museum in downtown Fargo.
Neat!
Next, a yellow: the Roger Maris museum, which perplexed us because the Google Maps preview displayed it as being in the dead-center of a mall. We figured, okay, the place takes up part of the mall, but the entrance and possible tickets would be external.
Turns out it's just a display case in a mall:
Well, to be fair, there was a little room with a video, and authentic stadium seats!
And like, okay. Great. It serves its purpose. But this is the guy that broke Babe Ruth's all-time record for home runs in a single season, and his legacy is reduced to a window display in a shopping mall. I think it might have taken the stress off of him in those last few games to know that this is how things would end up, even if he did break the record.
Leaving the mall, I got on the maps app yet again, and whizzing around, spotted something that I had remembered seeing in preparation for this trip, but hadn't set down on the list: the Hjemkomst center!
And you may be asking, what the Hjeck is a Hjemkomst?
I had seen pictures, and thought "hey that's kinda neat looking", but I had literally no idea what this place was. Given the name, I assumed it was some manner of Norwegian heritage museum, given the strong Norse population of the area (which, by the way, was technically Moorhead Minnesota).
Turns out it's just some random guy from the 80s who built a Viking ship to sail to Norway on. He died, so friends and family completed the journey in his stead, nearly dying along the way. They spent months on this boat and then built a museum about how they spent months on this boat. Also, totally unrelatedly, there's a replica medieval Norse church next door:
Which is the result of yet another guy who just decided, "hey, I'm gonna build this now". They slapped these two landmarks together and called it a Hjemkomst. Hell yeah.
Returning to Fargo, we at last made our way to the hotel. We relaxed a bit, then headed out again, first touring the campus of North Dakota State University, which had architecture reminiscent, to me, of Old Louisville houses, as well as a statue of their mascot, the Buffalump:
Next, we returned to the main drag of downtown and stopped by an old train station (similar to the one I saw in Springfield), because my mother wanted a picture with the clock:
Her maiden middle name, you see, was Fargo.
Food time was next - not exactly dinner, since we weren't really in the mood for a full and proper meal - and we chose the Würst Bier Hall. This was an excellent choice. The beers were good of course, but I have to tell you about the fluff. Can I please tell you about the fluff? I'm dying to tell you about the fluff.
We got a Bavarian giant soft pretzel, which on the menu said it came with both beer cheese and "marshmallow fluff". Marshmallow fluff? Sounds questionable at best, but it comes with, so fine, bring it on out. At first we stuck to the beer cheese. But curiosity gets the better of you. So eventually I dipped a pretzel chunk into some fluff.
My God. I've never had anything so good. I don't know what they put into this fluff but it tasted like all the best parts of funnel cake, a creme-filled doughnut, and cinnamon toast. It was heaven. It may in fact genuinely be worth a trip back to Fargo some day just to get The Fluff.
Hotel again, then bed. We're taking it slow and steady these first few days because, well, the way I normally travel could probably kill a bull moose on a time frame of more than a week, so we're pacing ourselves. But at a moderately early hour, we packed up, and headed west.
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