Chapter 13, Jamestown, ND to Winona, MN, 2026

When we left the missile launch facility, we drove back to Jamestown through Cooperstown. This was a small agricultural community that was established in 1882.  

As we were driving past a large park like area, we found a very old structure.

Also, located in the park-like area was a very large brick building that was identified as the Griggs County Courthouse. Because it was the weekend, everything was locked up and we couldn't visit. 

 

 The building seemed out of place because it was so large and the entire population of Griggs County is 2,239 people. 

 The return drive to Jamestown again took us through miles and miles of cultivated fields. 

 

 

As we drove throughout the northern tier of states, in these heavily cultivated areas, we kept coming across large storage facilities. At first, we thought these were silos, but they are not. We discovered that silos are used to store seed for local livestock. Grain  bins are used to store recently harvested crops. Then they can be held in climate control containers until commodity prices are favorable for their sale.

 

These storage facilities were huge, and they may give you an idea of just how much agriculture is occurring in the northern states. We would see facilities this size every few miles on every road we drove on.

The pictures make the weather look ominous and the temperature was in the mid 60s and very windy. 

This line of trees was actually a living snow fence that was protecting a ranch house and related barns and equipment sheds that seem to be connected to all of the large cultivated fields we were driving through. 

I would hate to be here in the winter!

 

    We also went by numerous large ponds and small lakes that seem to be naturally         occurring on the depressions of the undulating landscape.  In those ponds, we saw

large flocks of Swans and American White Pelicans.  Both birds are very large.  

   

Swans have a wingspan of 5 to 8 feet.

American White Pelican have an 8 to 9 foot wingspan!

 

We stayed in Jamestown, North Dakota, and used that as our home base when we visited the missile launch facility. When we made our reservations for our stay at that RV park, the owner told us that his park was located about 1 mile down a dirt road, but that the road was smooth and graded. 

He also said that there had been some frost heave on the road and that might make that portion of the road a little bumpy.  We told him that while driving down the dirt roadwe would just slow down and take the bumps gently. When we arrived at the dirt road, we had our first experience and, hopefully, our last experience with frost heave.

 It turns out that frost heave is caused by water that is trapped below the road surface. When that water freezes, it expands pushing the soil above it up at an uneven rate. That would have made the road a little bumpy, but that's not the rest of the story.

 

It turns out that when the ice melts, it does not go away, but returns to a watery state under the now heaved topsoil.  That essentially turns the topsoil into quicksand, which the motorhome did not like. When we first entered onto the frost heave portion of the road, I could feel the front tires starting to wiggle as we entered onto the darker portion of the soil in the pictures. I recognized that things were softer than they looked, and we kept our speed up and slithered across the quicksand and popped out on the other side. OK. We were at the campground for several days, and by the time it was time to leave, the road had dried out and we had no trouble at all getting back to the highway.

While we were at Jamestown, we visited their old town. There wasn't much to it, but they did have a giant buffalo.

The buffalo didn't look so big in that last picture, but look closely at this next picture to get a better idea of how big it is.

 

There were quite a few old buildings that had been moved to this location from all over the county and they were interesting to look into.

They had a small buffalo herd located on a hillside between the old town and the freeway, but all of the buffalo were hiding in the trees down in the creek bottom. This is what the big buffalo looks like from a long ways away. 

When we left Jamestown, we moved further east, and spent the night at a really nice county park in Fergus Falls, Minnesota.  We have found in the northeast, a lot of the small towns have county parks with RV hookups, and we have enjoyed staying in the small parks.  We were the only people staying in this park, except for one of the rigs that belongs to the work campers that cared for the park.

The park was on a beautiful lake that had a nice boat ramp and a small fishing pier.

We only stayed at this park one night and then continued east to the town of Winona, Minnesota, where we went to visit with our friends, Tom and Enid.  They took us on a nice tour around the town, and we visited Tom's hangar at the airport, as well as a beautiful overlook of the city and the Mississippi River.

One evening they took us out to dinner to their favorite restaurant.  Tom said he always gets the pan fried Walleye and so that is what we had because we had never had it before.  It was delicious and if you ever have a chance, try it!

We then continued our trip eastbound and our next stop was Madison, Wisconsin.  En-route, we stopped for fuel, and we can't remember whether we shared our diesel fuel secret with those of you that travel and use diesel fuel. We belong to a group of travelers that belong to an organization called Open Roads.  It is some type of a co-op that brings together RVers into one big conglomerate. They then negotiate trucker- style fuel discounts at numerous truck stops in large fuel stations across the country. We have been members for many years and it doesn't cost anything. One condition was that you connect a bank account to your Open Roads account so that the fuel that you buy is immediately deducted from your bank account.  

Click HERE for a link to Open Roads

 

The following picture shows you the pump price and the price we paid through Open Roads.  Open Roads does charge a small fee on each transaction, but it is clearly described when you sign up and it is so small that it is insignificant compared to the savings you have over the course of the trip.

 

 After leaving Winona, we continued on to Madison, which is the capital of Wisconsin. As we drove around town, we found the state capitol and figured we'd go check that one out too. We are glad we did.

 

 Compared to the concrete skyscraper in North Dakota, this looked beautiful. Once we found a place to park, we walked to the building and found that we were able to walk right into this building as well, although most of the offices were occupied and taking care of business. 

 

When you first walk into the building, the view is spectacular no matter which direction you look. There are actually six entrances to the building that all enter directly into the rotunda area. From there, you can walk to various offices. When we first entered, we took a picture of the first thing that we saw. This became important later.

 

 You can see from the above picture, there is a mural on the wall between the two arching hallways, moving away from the center of the rotunda. There were actually six of these arching hallways, all leading to various offices. Between each arching hallway was a mural. As we wandered around the capitol building for about an hour, pretty soon, all of the archways looked the same. After we felt that we'd seen everything, it was time to leave and the problem is, we could not remember which archway we needed to exit through to get back to our car.

 

 Fortunately, we had taken the initial photograph of the mural on the wall when we first came in, so we called up the picture on our phone, and then walked around the circular center of the rotunda until we re-created the picture. Then we knew that was the archway that we had entered through and when we exited, there was the pathway to our car.

 

  The previous picture showed a view of the inside of the dome at the capital. It looks quite elaborate, but a picture just doesn't show the amazing detail that is present throughout the building. Hopefully, the following two videos can help explain just how amazing this building was.

 

  When we finished at the Capitol, we returned to our motorhome, which was in a beautiful RV park.

 

 After returning to the motorhome, while looking for something stored under the motorhome, we found that there was a compartment door that would not open. We decided to fix that before we continued on our way to Napanee, Indiana, where we were going to visit the factory where our motorhome was built. 

 

The only way to unlock the stock compartment door was to access it from the other side of the motorhome. I was reminded of my claustrophobia as I crawled through the belly of the motorhome to get to the stuck door latch. Fortunately, it was an easy fix.

 

 We will continue to keep you posted on our travels and we hope you stay in touch, 

 

Tom & Suzie