Northern Exposure--Day 55

Our time in Duluth has come to an end and it is time to move on. The plan was to leave out around 9:00 AM and head west toward North Dakota but that did not happen. As has previously been mentioned, we were parked in a working boat yard, which was very fascinating to me. Yesterday, the owner mentioned that first thing Saturday morning they would be pulling one of the Vista boats out of the water for repairs. The Vista Fleet are the boats that are used for the harbor tours. The Vista Queen can hold about 40 passengers for a tour. Well, we just had to hang around long enough to watch them take her out of the water. Once they got her up and ashore they were able to work on one of her screws that had a bearing going bad.

Eventually, we did get on the road and headed west. Since we had been across most of the western part of the state on previous trips to Minnesota we did not plan to stop to see any of the sites, except for one. On our list from the RoadsideAmerica.com website we looked for "The Big Fish" in Bena. This is adjacent to a supper club of the same name. The fish is actually a building that originally housed a hot dog stand. While we were stopped we visited with a couple of girls that were part of a group who were crossing the country, via bicycle, on US Highway 2, going from New Hampshire to Vancouver, Washington. These two were stopped at their "chase vehicle". In all there were twelve of them plus a guy driving a van with a trailer with all their personal gear.

Our last stop before leaving Minnesota was in East Grand Forks, right on the state line with North Dakota. In a tourist guide we saw that the Cabela's store had a large statue of two moose fighting was in front of the store. (Cabela's is a chain of huge sporting goods stores throughout the northern part of the country.) Since I had never been in a Cabela's we decided to check it out. On the back wall was the greatest display of trophy animals. We also saw a bar and grill, named The Blue Moose, nearby. We had to stop to take pictures of the blue moose on the lawn.

We finally crossed the Red River of the North and drove into North Dakota. We drove through Grand Forks and out west of town to the Grand Forks Air Force Base where we set up camp in the base campground. This is an old Cold War base that was mainly used as the support base for the many missile silos that were scattered over the Dakota's, Wyoming and Montana. This base now is home to an Air Force refueling squadron. We did attempt to do some sightseeing around Grand Forks but there was not really anything to see in this small, military town.