Hog Log; 8/18:

No log for the 17th. Another day of sitting out thunderstorms in a motel room! It was a beautiful, bright & sunny day when I left Crookston, Minnesota this morning ... but it was cold! 46º as I pulled out of the motel parking lot! It warmed up a bit, into the 50s, as I entered North Dakota but about 200 miles into the state, on US-2, the sky darkened and I could see lightning strikes on the far western horizon. I stopped at a rest area and donned my rain gear, but the temperature dropped dramatically when the sun disappeared, and the prospect of riding through rain became less and less attractive. So I stopped at the first decent sized city on Hwy 2 in North Dakota, which turns out to be Minot. The scenery in North Dakota is fairly boring after a while, but maybe it's just those endless miles of flat landscape. A large part of that landscape is farmland and the major crop appears to be sunflowers! Who knew? Well ... maybe everybody knew. But I didn't. There are also a lot of lakes and marshland along the highway, which surprised me about ND. The marshes are thick with reeds and cattails and some kind of blooming purple water plant. I saw a lot of ducks and gulls and other waterfowl. The most striking was a 3-4 foot tall snowy-white wading bird ... egret? It was standing by the water's edge on one leg, hunched over and eyeing the still water. Also saw several large hawks on the wing. There was a surprising array of roadkill on Hwy2, including several adult deer. I passed the 2000 mile mark of my trip this morning! Tomorrow I enter Big Sky country ... Montana!

More later....