A Taste of What Could Have Been
We made a swift exit from Devil's Lake, and took the long, straight, US-2 to Great Forks, on the North Dakota / Minnesota border. We parked in Great Forks, North Dakota, and walked over the bridge to East Great Forks, Minnesota, where we had a tasty lunch on a terrace overlooking the river.
Like a lot of restaurants we've seen, this one's menu described gravy as "au jus", as in "slow roast beef served with au jus".
Back in North Dakota, we visited Great Forks' memorial park. Great Forks suffered a bit of a flood in 1997. The kind where everyone gets evacuated, then there's a fire just to keep the emergency services busy. The city is still in the process of rebuilding itself (there were men at work as we enjoyed our sightseeing). The height of the memorial shows the level of the snow before it melted into flood waters. The lower two flags fly at the height of the flood waters when a state of emergency was declared. The higher two flags show the highest point of the flood waters.
When we were planning this trip, our original idea was to do the Great River Road, following the Mississipi from its headwaters here in Minnesota, to its mouth in New Orleans. We didn't do that because we were scared of the August heat in New Orleans, but since we were passing by, we went to visit the Mississipi headwaters in Itasca state park. Closed roads meant we took a ridiculous route to the park, but we got there in the end, and after a short stroll, we were in a position to wade (or paddle) across the Mississipi River.
US-2 and the Great River Road intersect in Bemidji, so we followed the River Road there, to see what we were missing. We bridged the Mississipi several times, and by the last time it was quite sizeable. We stay with the river until Grand Rapids; we'll see how large a river it is by then.
In Bemidji, we found a motel on the lakeside, so we immediately went for a swim to help garner an appetite. This was lucky, because the food we found later on, was both delicious and plentiful. The place had its own microbrewery, and we enjoyed a sampler tray of their beers, all delicious.