Thursday, June 29, 2000

This will be our last day in North Dakota. Tomorrow we cross the Red River of the North and enter Minnesota. Today we rode the bicycle from Cooperstown to Fargo, a distance of 91 miles. Most of the day the route was quite flat. All day our direction varied from east to south. Going east was great because the wind was from the southeast.

This was the hottest day we have had since we left Pasco, WA. We did not find any restaurant to eat at so we did not get any long rest. We had to eat the food that we carry on the bicycle.

By afternoon, I was tired and we still had 20 or 30 miles to go. The drainage ditches along side the road all had some water in them, maybe 6 inches to a foot deep. But looking at the grass growing in the drainage ditches, you could see that the water recently had been 5 or 6 feet deeper. One week ago, Fargo got 7 ½ inches of rain in less than 5 hours. Normally Fargo gets 20 to 25 inches of rain in a year. So much rain is such a short time caused major flooding. The closer we got to Fargo, the more evidence of flooding that we saw and smelled. In many fields, there was either evidence of standing water and in some fields the entire field was still under water. The smell came from the rotting crops.

Nine miles from Fargo we stopped at a bar and filled all three water bottles with ice and water. Was that ever a treat having cold water. We came into Fargo on a road that had just been partially repaired. It was still closed where the road had been washed out during the flooding but it had been repaired enough that bicycles could be walked across the washed out area.