Yesterday Di and I spent the day with the Dairyland Beef Producers Association, on a tour through the local counties, checking out the agricultural scene.

Catching up with more Americans that have visited Waaia, we are now staying with Chuck and Carol Schwartau, and since Chuck was involved in the organising of yesterday, we were able to join in the tour and go check it out.

Really quite interesting, and Di was very impressed with the fact that she was able to compare what she knew from back home with what she was seeing. It seems she has taken quite a bit of knowledge in from the ag scene, more than either of us realised.

It was especially interesting to see a 800-cow dairy milking with only a 22-side parallel dairy. Seemed incredibly inefficient to us, but then, everything is different when the cows have to be protected from snow each winter.

Given the nature of the industry here, even the beef side of things was interesting since the disposal of effluent is a major issue here. A lot of town people moving to the country to enjoy the rural life find that when they move in, the rural life smells and is not quite the odourless picture postcard they imagined. As a result, the farmers around this area have to take new steps to minimise pollution issues of the past.

I also managed to get myself more famous, interviewed at length by two radio stations here, since they don’t get too many Australians going to that event each year. Kind of intimidating to be eating lunch, then have to do an interview on the radio, followed by another reporter from a rival station coming up and wanting an interview also.

Having a couple of problems with the van at the moment, because it seems to be losing charge. The local garage just confirmed it was the alternator that was the problem, coming to a total of about US$300 - ouch! Especially since we just went to a Ford service centre last week who diagnosed the problem as the starter and they charged US$191 to fix that. Really ouch! Almost AUD$1000 in a few days is a lot more than we wanted to spend in the last few weeks of owning the van…

We are thinking of going to check out Dodge County Fair this evening, which will allow us to cross another “must do” activity off the list of things we wanted to achieve in the US/Canada.

Perhaps there might be pie there too…

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Pie is good.

You cannot have too much pie.

Pie has made me look like a bloated piglet.

I have had a lot of pie in the past few days and am having a ball eating so much - now *this* is what the trip is all about!

We stopped in North Dakota and got free pie just for filling our van with petrol/gas which included corn-derived ethanol. How did we know about the free pie? From the billboards over the previous 60 miles on the Interstate, of course. If there is one thing more ubiquitous than pie, it’s billboards…

Anyway, we had some peach pie and some blueberry pie for free there.

Yesterday we went to the Heartland Sirloin Buffet in Alexandria and I got to sample all the different pies there as well.

• Pecan pie. Edible only to Americans perhaps - this is the worst pie flavour I’ve tasted.
• Chocolate bavarian pie. Believe it or not, it’s chocolate mousse on a chocolate cookie base, topped with KoolWhip and choc-chip bits). Incidentally, KoolWhip is what Americans use in place of whipped cream - but it is more like a light meringue liquid with the consistency of whipped cream. Sort of fluffy sugar that you can dollop with a spoon. Tastes foul to us. Americans love it.
• Peach pie again. Don’t understand why we do not have this in Australia - it is fantastic! Yum! Delicious! Whatever superlative you use, it still puzzles us to think we have peaches but no peach pie market back home.
• Blueberry pie again. Another good tasting pie, though not as fiercely fought for by us as peach pie is. Tastes very pleasant.
• Banana cream pie. Evil. Bad. Yuk. It’s just like a warm Barney Banana ice-cream, which, come to think of it, no longer exist back home anyway. I know why. They tasted bad too.
• Pumpkin pie. This one took a lot of guts to eat. Sounding bloody horrible, it actually does not taste anything like pumpkins. Very sweet, it has the stringy consistency of mashed pumpkin, and neither one of us eally thought it was good. Very different to what we’d both always thought it would taste like though.
• Baked cheesecake. Though not technically a pie, it was a crust with a filling, and tasted like an Aussie baked cheesecake. A little odd, since the cheese in the two countries tastes so vastly different.
• Apple pie. This one varies so much, it’s impossibe to really define. Sometimes they have so much cinnamon, you cannot taste the apple. Americans seem to love this version. Then, if you are not going to load it with cinnamon, you have to dump in at least 8 bags of sugar. Reserve another bag to sprinkle over the top. Today though, I tried an apple pie with not very much sugar at all - to the point where Clarence did not recognise it immediately as an apple pie due to the lack of sugar and different consistency.
• Gooseberry pie. With very little sugar in it, these berries are really tart and put quite a smile on the face when you are eating it. In the same way a lemon makes you smile. The first bite is the worst because you are expecting it to be sweet, even when warned it is tart, but as soon as you know what to expect with the next bite, it is a very nice flavour, we both agreed.

That’s for the past two days worth of sampling. Other pies we have tried in the past few months include:

• Key Lime pie. This one looked like a lemon meringue pie, and we bought it because it actually used egg whites for the meringue, not Kool Whip. Kind of tasted more like a lemon meringue pie too, as it did have some lemon in it, as well as lime. Quite a nice flavour and not anywhere near as evilly artificial as we were expecting.
• Strawberry-Rhubarb pie. Two fruits we never would have thought to put together, but these flavours really complimented one another. Would definitely buy it again. If only we could find it, since it seems to have vanished forever in supermarkets.

There are a few pies out there on the market that we are not really sure if we will ever try. Perhaps if we didn’t have a choice? And were in the desert? Dying? In any event, they do not sound great to us at all…

• Cherry pie. Knowing what US cherries taste like, this is just an evil sounding pie.
• Sweet potato pie. Neither of us really like the vegetable to begin with, so to put it in a pie does not make it appealing either.
• Peanut butter pie. Yes, it exists. No, we would not touch it with a forty-foot pole. It’s just one of those great mysteries - why do Americans need to put peanut butter in everything???
• Raisin pie. A “raisin” is actually a “sultana”, and we have no idea what they call raisins. Somehow they make it into a pie. Not sure how. Not sure why. Does not sound good at all.

We are sure there are plenty of other pies out there that we have not tried yet, nor found yet, and cannot give you details of right now. Still, we need to go have naps to get rid of this bloated feeling since our bodies are screaming “take us for a walk to get rid of the flab” but we can best avoid that by sleeping and not hearing the screams of protest…*grin*

Trav and Pie, er, Di.

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Coming to you from our 32nd state of the USA and for the first time from a WebTV system, it’s yet another installment from the people who you all love and miss so much…*grin*

We managed to have a very good 4th of July in Bismarck, North Dakota and it was really interesting to see the difference between the patriotic nature of US residents and their northern neighbours in Canada.

The main difference was that folks did not drape themselves in the flag, like they did in Canada. Speaking to a couple of people, it seems that it is a sign of disrespect here in the USA to wear the flag like a cape, even if it does look extra patriotic.

Secondly, the fireworks were a lot better in the USA. For all those people who ooh’ed and aah’ed over the ones in Edmonton, and hopefully some of them are reading this, I am sorry to say that the USA beats you hands-down when it comes to loud colourful explosive devices.

The city of Bismarck and the neighbouring city of Manda (they are separated only by a river) reverberated for almost 3 days solid as everyone set off fireworks all over the place. It is legal to set them off in your yard in the middle of the city at any time of day or night for the period that the state permits fireworks sales, it seems.

Therefore, right up until the 5th July, there were artillery shells raging all over the place. We stayed in the Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park (7 miles south of Mandan) and right across the river from us were some houses that were competing with one another to have the biggest fireworks displays. Between 7pm - 11:30pm on the 3rd July, there were fireworks visible in the sky at all times as they all set off large colourful ones, whistling ones, sparkly ones, and any other sort they could lay their hands on. It was fantastic.

Of course, faced with these new rules, we had to splurge and bought some Roman Candles ourselves. Hey, we’re not allowed to set them off back home - we’d better do it when we get the chance!

I am sure you are all thankful you never saw me when the powers that be allowed me to be in the same vicinity as loud, exploding, spark-shooting, projectile launching pyrotechnics. It was a dream come true for me! And pure terror for Di! However, we survived unscathed, and Di even set one off in the end.

We also took in the town parade and caught Tootsie Pops thrown to us by the floats in the parade, and watched as weird cars, firetrucks, racing lawnmowers, clowns, cheerleaders, a variety of North Dakota beauty pageant winners, and horses pranced past in their best red, wite and blue bunting.

At the end of the day, we went to the Capitol building and enjoyed a concert by a symphonic orchestra (ooh - how cultural! how refined! how free!) with fireworks at the end. These were *real* fireworks with massive explosions that literally were rocking the ground and trees around. It was great!

The next day, we made our way eastward over North Dakota to Jamestown and checked out the World’s Largest Buffalo there. We had found the World’s Largest Friesian Cow a few days before in New Salem, North Dakota - probably the one and only time Di will try to milk a cow with teats the size of footballs!

We meandered further into Fargo, North Dakota - fulfilling a goal of ours, which was to be there and say “Ya! Ya! F’ing Ya!” - and if you do not understand this, be sure to check out the movie “Fargo”. Then again, if you are already happy enough with how often you have heard the “F word”, do not rent the movie. It’s pretty full-on when it comes bad language.

Finally, we made it to the little town of Hawley, Minnesota where we ate dinner, and went to keep driving, only to find the starter motor in the van had suddenly died and we were not going anywhere.

Went to Burns Ford company in the morning and got it fixed immediately ($191 USD) despite the lengthy queue of locals ahead of us. Hurrah!

Arrived in Osakis yesterday and met Clarence and Edna again, for the first time since 1991 when they came out to Australia on a dairy-farmer tour (the same as what my folks just did this year to bring them to the USA). They stayed with us back then and invited us to come and visit them when we made it to the USA one day. A decade later, the goal was achieved and we’ve been here having a lot of fun.

A most amusing aspect of our visit is they have a small doll (”Pomp”) who is the son of Sacagewea (the female Indian guide who was instrumental to the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803). They auctioned for the rights to own the doll for a couple of months at their last family reunion, and they have been photographing it all over the place - from the border of Canada, to posing with the giant Viking statue in Alexandria, Minnesota, to being in the pulpit with their pastor at their church.

It’s pretty funny stuff to watch the faces of people quite happy to go along with the stunt and take their pictures with the doll and it has provided a great deal of amusement for us all.

So, getting back to the initial thread of which country is the more patriotic - I would have to say that Canadians are more proud of their country than the Americans. Not that the latter are backward in coming forward about their great nation, but we feel the greater patriotic spirit came from the Canadians - a very different observation than we expected to find…

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Originally posted from Beach, North Dakota, this update was split into multiple parts (see related articles) for the sake of reducing the loading time due to the images involved…

Went to Edmonton after that, to see the largest shopping mall in the world (they have dolphins in there, as well as a massive triple loop roller coaster). There is also a Santa Maria (where Christopher Columbus left his ship after his return to India - see the missive from Couer d’Alene if you do not understand this reference).

We also saw national patriotism in the city for Canada Day, where we sampled a free pancake and maple syrup breakfast in pouring rain, watched a street parade and then ooh’ed and aah’ed at the fireworks at the end of the day. They get a little bit more excited about their country than we Aussies do, and they are supposed to be relatively modest compared to the USA…

Down to the town of Vulcan, where we met Michelle, the person who works in the Science and Trek station. Basically, the town was named after the God of Fire, but when Star Trek introduced Spock, they had a new thing on their hands entirely. Michelle is “not really into Trek”, but she does own a Starfleet uniform and has altered a golf cart into a shuttlecraft which she drove to work, until the police stopped her because it violated road laws.

Afterward, went to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a world heritage site where native Americans used to chase buffalo off a cliff to kill them. Apparently, one day, a brave decided to stand under the cliff to watch them go over the top, but the hunt was good and so many went over, they crushed his skull. Hence the name of the place.

Came back into the USA last night and experienced the joys of a border crossing where all does not go well. Were one step away from the guard snapping on the latex gloves. Basically, he felt that since we had bought the car and had a US address to buy the car, we were trying to pass ourselvees off as US citizens - perish the thought! - and threatened to cut up our US visas and impound the car before dumping us on the Canadian side of the border. Not sure why he was so aggressive about it all, but it was certainly way down on the list of “pleasant things to be threatened with”…

He especially did not like me. I hate it when that happens - I’m such a likeable guy…*grin* (this is the point where you all agree, or at least, don’t disagree).

Now in North Dakota, having spent all day driving over Montana. Incidentally, there *IS* a speed limit in Montana. On 28th April, 1999, they adopted a speed limit like all the other states, so we were not able to do 100mph. Bother.

Going to Bismarck, North Dakota to see the 4th of July celebrations, and sing “Yankee Doodle Dandy” with the best of them.

Just another travel tip - if you feel like taking a credit card overseas and you’re thinking American Express, don’t. Take a fork. Put the fork in your wallet. When you feel you need to have pain and anguish, get the fork and poke it into your eye. It’s less painful than dealing with American Express. Trust me.

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Originally posted from Beach, North Dakota, this update was split into multiple parts (see related articles) for the sake of reducing the loading time due to the images involved…

We are now back in the USA, having spent the last few days in Canada. We headed to Vancouver first, and then made our way eastward on the TransCanadian Highway. Actually, we spent more time stopped at roadworks than driving, we think, since there were heaps of places where the road was under major repair.

We also met an interesting style of truck driver - a man who put his semi up on two wheels at the rear axle as he spun around corners too fast for him to handle. We ended up passing him on a small straight section since he was drifting over double lines, but managed to get the first stone chip in the windscreen of the trip. Bugger.

We went to Banff National Park and also to the Columbian Icefields in Jasper National Park, where we touched the Athabasca Glacier - good to touch a glacier after we attempted to in New Zealand and then were stopped a mere 100 metres away from the toe. Plenty of SPOTD’s walking past the warning signs (in multiple languages), telling them not to go onto the glacier since hidden ice crevices existed and they might fall through. Alas, none fell through.

Saw some elk, and thankfully no bears. We still have not seen a moose, which is a bit disappointing.

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