Hillsboro, ND 7/16

Here is a picture of my new crackle glass. Pretty, aren't they? I've really done pretty good, I have only picked up 5 pieces altogether since we've been on the road. I have to make a point of staying out of the antique stores so I can resist temptation. The other three I have gotten were colors or shapes I didn't have yet, couldn't resist. Red and green seem to be the least common colors and amber the most prevalent. I love glass, that something so fragile is forged from sand and fire continually amazes me.

I hope this heat wave breaks soon. Last night at 10 P.M. we thought we would step outside of the a/c and enjoy the evening. It wasn’t dark yet and the clouds were pretty. Opened the door and it was like a sauna! Ninety-five still and 75% humidity!!! Ick, yuck, pewwie. It had rained about 30 giant raindrops so it smelled like wet grass and cows too. Needless to say we ran back inside! Had to sleep with the a/c on all night.

We got up and decided to skip our exercise. Got ready to go, drove over and dumped the tanks and hit the road. We drove along the county roads. Not much traffic, but also the other drawback to county roads is unless you run across a town there is no where to pull out if you want to stop for something. Never any where to stop for pictures unless I want to be a goober and just stop in the middle of the road. We have seen that a couple times, and we don’t really want to do that. There are a lot of little “roads” that the farmers use to get into their fields and we found one of those to back onto finally. Had to have our cereal and fruit!

We only went 120 miles today. Perfect day, I think. We left around 10 and got in here after 1:00. We are in Hillsboro on the eastern border of North Dakota halfway between Grand Forks and Fargo. Tomorrow we’ll be in Minnesota. They don’t expect this heat to let up until the end of the week and we’ll be farther east and who knows what we’ll get into?

Because we are this far north already we have decided that we are going to keep north and travel through northern Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and drop into Ohio from Michigan. We have had our fill of farmland for awhile. It has its own beauty but seems endless!

Have to share this: there were three kids doing something with a bucket of water and a hammer in the dirt across from our site. They were at the back of our trailer at one point and Larry asked what they were doing. They were using the water to flush squirrels out of their holes and then whacking them on the head with a hammer. Seemed like a pretty barbaric game to me, I know these ground squirrels are a nuisance, but hammer-whacking for sport? They would put the dead squirrels in a bucket and later in the evening they would dump them out in the middle of the field and then they would watch the foxes and coyotes come in to eat them. A form of chumming I guess. I figure the parents were happy as long as the kids were busy doing something! Nature expeditions?!