On Wednesday (July 29), we left our campground in Wisconsin to begin the trek toward Yellowstone. It’s a pretty long drive and we decided not to try to rush ourselves too much.
Our route was going to take us through the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, so we mapped out a route that took us to the Apple Store. The stop at the Apple store was to obtain an adapter so we can download from our camera to the iPad. Angie had an adapter for her old tablet, but now all our devices require lightning adaptors so a new one was required. It plugs into the cable that attaches to the camera. We’ve since found that this process burns a lot of camera battery, and in addition, since I only have a16 gig iPad, I’m continuing to just pull the card out and download straight to my MacBook, since it has a port for the SD card.
Once we’d finished with our “chores,” we continued to Alexandria, Minnesota, where we were spending the night. We had opted for a hotel over camping for this night, and were lucky enough to find that the hotel offered enough TV channels that they had the MLS All-Star game on Fox Soccer, which featured my favorite team, Tottenham Hotspur, with a game we may well have gone to if we’d been in Denver. My brother and his family were there and Angie thinks she may have seen them on the screen at a moment that I had looked away for some reason. Spurs lost, but it was fun to watch some of my favorite players and check out some of the new acquisitions Spurs had made in the off season.
Thursday was pretty much a road day but we made one stop early. North Dakota was until this time one of only two states to which Angie had not yet been (and a new state for me).

We decided to stop at the visitors center in Fargo, which Angie had heard was kind of interesting. I guess its biggest claim to fame is that it has on display the wood chopper from the movie Fargo. Since neither of us had seen the film (it’s too gory for me and the wood chopper features in a nasty scene I believe) this was only marginally interesting.

Fargo is a big city and our understanding is that its massive growth has more to do with North Dakota’s oil boom than its notoriety from the movie.
We left Fargo, to head for Bismarck where we were going to be spending the night. We got there early enough, on a surprisingly hot day, to take a walk from our hotel down to the Capitol building, which is Bismarck’s main claim to fame. The building is the tallest in the entire state, and was of interest to me because it was built in the Art Deco style in 1934.

So many of the capitol buildings I’ve seen are modeled on the neoclassical style of the US Capitol, but this is much more to my taste since I am fond of much of the architecture of the 30s and 40s. The capitol is part of a big state government campus within a great park and is home to the legislature and the supreme court of North Dakota.
Even more interesting in a way was the building we saw at the beginning of our walk. Judging by the architecture, it was built in the 1960s (my later research confirmed this, but didn’t give me much more information). The building was named the Manhattan and was just a great example of 1960s architecture but my web searches didn’t give me any further information.

We didn’t get to see the inside of the Capitol building but I’d be tempted to come back to Bismarck for a closer look if it was on my way somewhere.