Thursday, July 22, 2010

Day 31 Canada, Int'l. Peace Garden & Rugby, ND

We drove about an hour north from Minot to the Canadian Border.

The Canadian border guards asked us where we were from and where we were going.
We said we were going 100 yards to take the picture of the welcome sign & turn around. They thought we were crazy that we'd drive 1,000s of miles to do that.
So we when we had to go back though US customs, the border guard had seen that I took pictures of the customs buildings and I had to delete them. But he didn't ask Wanda to delete hers.
But he said we could take pictures of the signs & monuments.

So we parked the car in the USA and walked back across "no man's land" and took some pictures on the border and of the signs.
This is typical scenery of most of North Dakota ( also SD, eastern WY & MT ),

with miles of fields filled with tens of thousands of hay bales. But in northern ND we passed miles & miles of blue & yellow fields. One field I measured was 2.3 miles long.
We asked what they were... blue is Flax and yellow is Canola.

The International Peace Garden was begun in 1931 as a symbol of the friendship between the 2 countries.


We drove through the park and stopped at various points for pictures

My only question with the Peace Garden was why did they have to put it so far away from anything else?
I guess that they figured they'd get tourists like me to drive 3 hours out of the way to walk the grounds, take pictures & buy some souvenirs. Surprisingly, at the gift shop they had 2 cash registers, one for each country's currency.

The front of the car is in USA, the rear in Canada

The Floral Clock design is changed every year.
Even though we had driven back & forth across the border in the Peace Garden, we still officially drove through customs again to take the picture of the Manitoba welcome sign.
The Northernmost point of the trip
and then back through customs to North Dakota.
About an hour south of the Peace Garden is Rugby, ND
Another Absolute Location. The visitor center was really amazing.
In a little 30' square building they had tourist info & maps from all 50 states, all the provinces & territories of Canada and Mexico.

Our 20th state. Back in Minnesota , "Land of 10,00 Lakes", my mother's home.
When I was a kid coming here to visit the relatives, Dad would always get us to start counting all the lakes we saw in MN. including every farm pond & mud puddle. Wanda was driving & I was sleeping so no lakes were counted on this trip.

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