Welcome to Bismarck, ND!

Time for trip number 2 of the summer! I left for North Dakota yesterday afternoon. A quick layover in Minneapolis and I found myself flying over tons of beautiful, green farm land. We landed at the tiniest airport I’ve been to in the US. Not smaller than Grenada, but it certainly gives Roanoke a run for its money. The airport had four small gates and two tiny luggage carousels. I called my hotel upon arrival and they promised to send a shuttle over soon. Our flight of less than 50 people quickly cleared out of the terminal and I found myself sitting out front in the warm evening sunshine at what felt like a completely deserted airport!

When my shuttle arrived, I loaded up and headed off in a minivan with the words “Comfort Inn” emblazed across the back. Kind of strange since I was booked at the Ramada Inn, but you never know! Well, as it turned out, the taxi driver had somehow been contacted through a central agency, but was unaware of the Ramada Inn part of my trip as made clear when we pulled up out front of the Comfort Inn haha. A quick laugh and jaunt across the road brought me to my hotel.

My roommate turned out to be one of the vets on the trip. She was very nice and offered a dinner reservation with a few of the other people on the trip. They had decided to scope out a restaurant across the street called East 40. Since we are kind of in the middle of nowhere North Dakota and it doesn’t strike me as a very wealthy area (although apparently there is a huge oil boom currently), I was definitely not expecting every item on the menu to be $25+! Crazy! Lucky for me, there was an $11 pizza and as we went around the table placing orders, I was able to split it with another girl. They messed up the order pretty badly but when we did finally get our food it was delicious!

This morning we met as a group for the first time. After doing roll call and getting trip instructions, we had an hour break to grab some food for the day. As it turns out, neither Walmart nor Kmart open until noon on Sundays! There was a 24 hour grocery store just down the street though so we were able to stock up on food and snacks for the week. We met back up and formed a caravan to drive 3 hours out to the reservation. We are currently still driving along and the landscape is a lush green, dotted with cows, and rather flat! We are passing tons of little ponds and it slowly dawned on us that these are actually areas of flooding! We’ve passed a few roads under water already along with many fences and utility pole. We just drove over a one lane dirt bridge that looks like it is made of packed dirt over a flooded highway road. Crazy! We have just over an hour left on our drive, wonder what else we will see!