Western Towns and Wacky kids...

So anyway...  

Apparently, the world's largest buffalo wasn't enough of a tourist draw, so they built an entire tiny western town on the same property.  

Cool.

Having arrived first in this tourist mecca, the kids and I wandered through the local mercantile while we waited for Jess to arrive.

Meeting a blog friend for the first time is just plain weird... so many thoughts flit through your head.  

What will they be like?  What will they think of me? 

What if we don't like each other?  What what what... 

And you find yourself trying to imagine how the initial meeting will go,
but there's no way to actually plan it is there?

So I was wandering the mercantile and out the window I saw some tiny familiar faces.  

They were the main cast of characters over at Jess' blog.  And with them was Jess, of course.  

I opened the creaky screen door and timidly asked, "Jess?" 

I don't exactly remember what happened next, it's all a bit of a blur of introductions

and wandering around the over-sized bison 

and maybe some griping about taking pictures in the harsh light of noontime in the summer.

And I remember that my ginormous children were also in a bit of a mood,
not a bad one, just silly.  

They were playing on playground equipment clearly marked "for small children only." 

(Seriously... where's their parent?  Oh... taking pictures of their bad behavior? Hmmm.)

They made themselves comfortable in the saloon (a bit too comfortable maybe) 

and settled down for a game of cut-throat poker. 

(How do they even know how to play that?) 

Which resulted in a few people getting put in jail.  

And while all this was going on, Jess and I got to know each other, to find out who we were and if we like each other as well in "real life" as we did on line.  

This may have been just a bit more important as we had planned to spend the entire day together at her house eating REAL food and not doing laundry. 

(I had recently decided to do laundry during a quick stop in South Dakota.)  

We watched our children play (or rather my children act like crazies while her children looked on warily)

and bonded over the mutually mystifying concept of some guy's use of a pop-up flash with a very expensive and very long lens. 

"Doesn't he know that he'll get a shadow??" 

(I believe this may still give Jess a twitch from time to time.)
  :) 

And then... after a lunch of curly fries and chicken nuggets, we packed the children up and Jess bravely allowed us to follow her back to her home.

Or were we the ones being brave??
 

After driving and driving and driving down a dusty road 

and then turning down yet another dusty road in the middle of farmland

with nothing but corn, sunflowers and sky as far as the eye can see, 

Julia pipes up and asks,

"Hey mom?  Shouldn't one of the rules be 'Never follow a stranger into the middle of nowhere?'" 

Yes, Julia.... that's a good rule, a very good rule... ;)

North Dakota on my mind...

As I was planning our trip across country, whenever I told someone that we were going through North Dakota they would invariably ask "Why?"

It wasn't a why as in "why on earth would you want to go there?!"

in a tone that is generally reserved for New Jersey, third world countries and well... Seattle.

No... it was more of a question of "Why go there? What is there to see or do?"

They were curious, but...

Honest truth... I had no idea.

North Dakota seems to suffer from a lack of advertising.

I wonder if the people of ND prefer it that way, maybe it keeps all the riff-raff and obnoxious tourists away.

I did a lot of research to see what might be worth seeing in the great state of ND.

First thing on my list...

The world's largest buffalo statue!

Yeah, man... I'm going there!

I'm a sucker for cheesy and dorky tourist attractions and world's largest anything.

And... Grant's favorite animal for all of his childhood was a bison/buffalo.

He even had a stuffed bison that he had named "Adonis."  

(Gotta love that kid.)
So we had to go.

As I planned this little pit stop, a voice from blogland called out and said,

"I live just a few miles from that 'largest buffalo', let's get together."

(Or something like that.  I'm paraphrasing.)

To which I replied, "Great!  I'll have run out of clean clothes by then.  Can I do laundry at your house?"

Screech!!!  Hold on!
Did I just ask a total stranger (albeit a blog friend) if I could come to her house

and do laundry???

Who does that?

And who would let me?

Well, I did and Jess would. 

:)

(Grant getting ready for his first buffalo run.)

But... in an effort to ease into that activity, we both agreed to meet at the World's Largest Buffalo Statue.

(Large bovines make great meeting places.)

(see Jess back there?)

 The story of that meet up and the trip to her house where I didn't end up doing laundry
will have to wait for another day.