Thursday August 29 ... Grand Forks, Minnesota to Weyburn, Saskatchewan

Woke in Grand Forks to a noisy thunderstorm!  By 10 a.m. the skies were starting to clear so we suited up and headed out.  Grand Forks and it's sister city across the Red River are the commercial hub of northeastern Dakota and an agricultural processing centre for potatoes, sugar beets and wheat.

Love these windmills...apropos of nothing took do with the text above...:)

On our journey one thing we noticed in almost every field we passed, we're tall stands of cattails in lots of standing water.  Sometimes these were on the sides of fields and at other times they were smack dab in the centre of fields...wondered if they are always there or if this is a particularly wet year.

Grand Forks to Devils Lake, to Rugby and Minot.  On the stretch of highway beyond that, between Minot and Kenmare, we went through a very beautiful stretch...kind of in an area that looked like it could have been a river bed at one time.  It reminded us of southern Alberta's rolling hills and farm fields.  

LOVE this one of a crooked old red barn...

There were lots of "numbers" on the hills, made from white painted rocks it looked like.  We made an assumption that this was someone local high school students did to commemorate their graduation year.

Nearing the customs crossing into Canada we came upon a sight that made us feel like we would soon be back in Saskatchewan! :). Hope you can spot the oil pump jack...

Bienfait, a coal strip mining operation for the power plant, was another roadside view we saw.  It came upon us out of nowhere...looked like a huge operation! 

We could tell the area had a lot of rain...look at this photo...where you see the water on both sides of the road, it is generally just grass!

We came across a lot of rail traffic today and instead of taking photos I decided to count the cars on two particularly long trains...one had 117 cars and the other 113, many of them with two containers stacked on top of each other on each car, and both trains pulled by only two engines.  You must be thinking by now that I have WAY too much time on my hands on the back of the blue machine! :)

We pulled into Weyburn for the night about 6:30 p.m. and we're greeted by these impressive sculptures.

A light supper and time to write the blog and relax a bit.  On to Saskatoon tomorrow to see Heather, Eli and Easton.  Looking forward to the visit...