This is it, the storied absolute middle of it all. Behind us on our right is the obelisk denoting the Geographical Center of North America here in the small crossroads town of Rugby, North Dakota. There’s not a lot of fanfare one can make of having been here, no awesome light show, fireworks, fountain, or clowns, just the two of us before 6:00 a.m.

After scrubbing our windshield free of bugs for the umpteenth time, we tossed our first tick out of the car (it had crawled up to the roof above the passenger door).  Slightly distressed, we picked up a couple of coffees at the Coffee Cottage Cafe (conveniently located between our motel and the center of the North American Universe), which smartly opens at 6:00 a.m. and turned north on North Dakota Route 3 with the early sunrise over our right shoulder. Our destination is the Great White North, but first, we must pass through what appears to be the most sparsely populated corner of the United States we’ve traveled through so far. There are plenty of signs that people are out here farming, but we are hard-pressed to see where they live. Birds, on the other hand, are ubiquitous.

After driving 1,909 miles in two and a half days, we arrived at the Canadian border. Time to go home.

Seems like we just got to Canada and here we are already back in the United States of America. Okay, the truth is we never actually left because we didn’t bring our passports. Seventy-two hours ago, we’d never have believed we’d actually make it this far, but here we are at the international border, and while Border Control Officer Beaver (yep, that’s really his name) has assured us that if we dip over into those northern foreign lands he has the ability to verify ownership of passports via his trusty computer, we demur and, with tails between legs, stay on the warm snuggly side of our home country.

In retrospect, we blew it. There we were at the entrance of the International Peace Garden, maybe the only time in our life, and we didn’t go in. Then again, there’s this vast open space on our map that tracks along the Canadian border for nearly the entire width of Montana, so that could be a future goal. Such is life; we are on Route 43, driving west just a few miles south of Canada on our way through the Turtle Mountains. Who knew there were mountains in North Dakota?

Before horses and settlers took up roots here, this area was the home of the Plains Ojibwe tribe. I’m hoping they went south for the winter, as I’d imagine the cold season here is a difficult one.

At times, to my distraction, Caroline studies the map during our road trips instead of the surrounding scenery. Today, that attention to the details has paid off as her curiosity had her asking, what the heck is Mystical Horizons? It is a modern version of Stonehenge, first conceived by Jack Olson, who was an aerospace engineer, inventor, and author who lived nearby. Sadly, Jack passed away before his vision of an astronomical site was realized, but the community around him made sure his dream came to be. There’s a ton of information about the site, how to use the fixtures for observation of the winter and summer solstices, along with the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, the polar star, and the life of Jack. There was mention of his book titled Once In The Middle Of Nowhere: The Center of the Universe: A Collection of Turtle Mountain Tales, which should arrive at our door the first week of June.

The other major payoff of visiting Mystical Horizons on the Turtle Mountains is the incredible view. We could even see the high rises of Dallas, Texas, far off in the distance. For those of you like my wife, who insists the world is NOT flat, she informed me that we didn’t see any high rises of anything anywhere and that the grain silos I’m confused about were maybe 10 miles away in Bottineau. Yeah, whatever.

This is likely Unit 357 Reservoir on the Souris River, also known as the Mouse River in some parts. The river flows out of Canada about 45 miles west of here and continues south about 70 miles through Minot, North Dakota, before looping to return to Canada and merge with the Assiniboine River. The Assiniboine joins the Red River that got its start down between North Dakota and Minnesota before finally flowing into Lake Winnipeg in the province of Manitoba, Canada. I don’t expect anyone else reading this to really care about the flow of the rivers, but by following their paths on the map, I was able to better understand their drainage basins and where water is going that falls in this part of the United States.

We are about 50 miles (78 km) west of our first encounter with the Canadian border near Kelvin because it is our goal to start the trek south from this particular point. Before I get to that detail, did you know that the name Canada is based on an Iroquoian word, “Kanata,” meaning “settlement,” “land,” or “village?”

We are looking south standing at the northern terminus of U.S. Route 83 that runs to Brownsville, Texas, 1,885 miles (3,034 km) away. We will not be traveling the entirety of that today nor tomorrow because we’ll be turning west in Shamrock, Texas, 1,093 miles (1,759 km) from right here tomorrow in the late afternoon. Should you be curious about lengthy roads here in the States, Highway 1 on the east coast runs from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida, and while Caroline and I have been on the terminus of both ends, we are yet to drive the length of that road. Out of curiosity, I looked up the longest east/west highway, which turns out to be U.S. Route 20, starting in Boston, Massachusets, and ending in Newport, Oregon, for a distance of 3,365 miles (5,415 km). You can guess what I’m dreaming of while I write this.

We’re almost 200 miles south by the time we stop at the gas station across the street from this cattle weighing station in Sterling, North Dakota. While not wanting to skip all the opportunities to grab photos of our adventure, we must also contend with the fact that we’d like to be home in Arizona before Wednesday, and judging how weather and too many stops will impact our schedule is not an exacting science for the easily distractable. During our drive, we made breakfast from our deli stash in the ice chest, picked up more coffee in Minot, and passed through Bismarck, North Dakota, by noon before arriving at this junction 30 minutes later.

What is it about certain horses that seem to draw us in? Seriously, they sent friendly vibes to us as we were about to drive by. While we’ve been stopping for decades for roadside animals, these days, upon seeing horses, we can’t help but give a thought to our niece Katharina over in Germany.

Over a year and a half ago, my daughter Jessica and I were passing right through here near the birthplace of Lawrence Welk in Strasburg, North Dakota. You can read about that day she and I traveled U.S. 83 right here, CLICK. Just like that trip, Caroline and I brought up the classic Bubbles in the Wine written by Lawrence Welk.

Looking at that old post, I realize that by being here so early in the summer, Caroline and I are missing the maturing fields of corn and sunflowers.

Then again, we are missing nothing as we are enjoying this experience just the way it is.

We just drove around that imposing dark storm cell and, for about two minutes, even encountered a bit of rain. While I wished for more to help clean off the plastered bugs taking up permanent residence on our grill, it was brief, and before we entered the maelstrom, we turned and skirted the whole affair.

This is like a drive into a fairytale where the road brings us to an enchanted, unimaginable place distilled right out of our most wonderful dreams. On countless excursions over highways and byways, Caroline and I have always known that we’ll stumble into sight and sound combinations that will hold extraordinary novelty for our senses to such an extent that we’ll grip one another’s hand and glance over to affirm our astonishment that it was us at this moment who were the fortunate ones. This sky, these clouds, the soft rolling hills, and the very idea that somehow, with no one else out here, we should be the only people on earth to see these kinds of sights with our own eyes.

So where did the road deliver us? To this crossroads south of Murdo, South Dakota, where one can choose to go left and return the way they came or go straight ahead and in an hour find themselves in Nebraska, and that’s the choice we are making.

We are driving through the Rosebud Off-Reservation Trust Land, which appears to be a patchwork of plots north of the Rosebud Indian Reservation that we’ll cross further south of here. It’s such a peculiar thought to consider that pre-colonialism, there were more than 30 to 60 million bison roaming these plains. Only 150 years ago, our ancestors radically altered the environment by destroying the grasslands of the Great Plains and bringing the population of bison to a mere 541 animals remaining in the wild. Today, there are only 15.5 million people living on these lands, and those bands of Native Americans who once understood how to live in these environments are relegated to reservations where they struggle with a past and an uncertain future that remain neglected and out of sight.

It’s as though the storm of the white man swept over the land and scraped the world clean, leaving behind a sterilized world that was their own to exploit. Sure, I know that way of life is now long gone, but I have no sense that we’ve ever truly honored the lives and lifestyles of people who were so ruthlessly marginalized and nearly made extinct, like the animals with whom they shared these lands.

A “facilities” break was required by my passenger and travel companion, who’s been known to answer to Dweeb, Wife, Dream0line, Hey Du, and some unpublishable monickers. While she was next door tending to things, I walked over to this old gas station in White River that’s been closed for more than a decade, wondering who was the very last person to tank up here. A thought comes to mind: my paternal grandfather, John Alexander Wise, used to do quite a bit of traveling across the United States back in the 1960s through the 1980s, which has me wondering, have we ever filled up in some remote place he once visited? My earliest memories include him showing slides from a projector on his dining room wall of the places he had visited, but all those old images were lost to a flood in Buffalo, New York, after his death, along with a bunch of my father’s stuff that was stored in a basement of aunt’s house. Where might the spirit of Grandpa Wise be traveling?

We’ve entered the Rosebud Indian Reservation and tuned into “The Sicangu’s Voice KOYA 88.1 FM,” but not for long. Listening to new-wave stuff from the 80s is not really our kind of nostalgia when looking to listen in on the sounds of the Plains Indians.

Have you ever traveled forever into the infinite? We have. Upon these roads that go places you can never dream of, we have found our imaginations rewarded for having the wherewithal to be present in our lives. There you are, this thing between this and that, and none of it cares if you exist or not other than you and those who love you. There is no real way to record how you saw the world around you beyond some fragments of thoughts, an image or two, or maybe some poetry. Would you walk the floor of the ocean, the surface of the moon, or ride a bicycle in another dimension? So, why do so many fail to witness the spectacle that is all around them?

We do not waste time changing television stations or subscribing to streaming media; we transition between states and countries, landscapes and environments, and love and affection. Like Nebraska, we are searching for the good life.

I’ve tried avoiding using the many photos I took through our windshield, but this tiny chunk of forest in Nebraska had just sprung up, and I wanted to capture it without making a frantic stop, so here it is. Knowing that I’d be taking so many photos from the driver’s seat, we’ve stopped frequently to clean the windshield, and though I do feel compelled to share some of them, I’m not exactly happy with the motion blur, reflection, and tone differences that I find difficult to repair.

We visited our first Valentine back on Christmas Day, 2002, in Texas on our way to Big Bend National Park, and now here we are in Valentine, Nebraska, on Memorial Day weekend, 2023, and while not a déjà vu, it must be some kind of thing. What that thing is is not definable as I write, but I’ll take some time to ponder, and should I ever find out what brought this about, I’ll share it in a future update.

Like rainbows, I love these moments when a small cloud blots out the sun in a kind of eclipse, allowing me to gaze at the sky differently than I was just seconds before.

Not quite like this snake, but figuratively speaking, we’ve slithered over the landscape here in the middle of the United States, covering 630 miles so far, 110 miles still lay ahead.

That was our second snake encounter on this trip; yesterday, we saw one, and I photographed it, but it was on the road, and while it was alive, something didn’t seem right, and with so many other photos to write to, I skipped it. This brings up the many stops we’ve stopped to enjoy birds and the occasional frog. This is Ballards Marsh, where Caroline identified swarms of tree swallows over in those trees on the right; we also spotted two of what appeared to be some seriously tuned-in/tuned-out guys who’d pulled up their campers, popped out chairs and, with a goodly distance between them, sat there in the quiet of the prairie and seemingly did nothing. We were envious that we could not do the same.

Regarding the birds, we’ve seen and listened to quite a number of them in the last few days, including white pelicans, yellow-headed blackbirds, red-shouldered blackbirds, crested flycatchers, eastern kingbirds, pheasants, Canadian geese, merganser ducks, coots, cormorants, swans, seagulls, white-tailed hawks, a turkey, and I was pretty certain at least one eagle. Sadly, while we were up near Canada, we didn’t spot a single moose.

It will be 9:30 p.m. by the time we reach North Platte, Nebraska, but there will be no rushing to some cheap hotel as we are racing to make it to Runza, a small mid-west sandwich chain only found in Nebraska and a few surrounding states. Way back on Day 2 of this Great-Plains-Absolute-Middle-of-it-all adventure, we were stopping in Schoenchen, Kansas, when the lady we had asked how to pronounce the town name, upon hearing Caroline was from Germany, was certain we’d love us a Runza. These sandwiches are pretty far away from anything we know as German, but they are certainly unique, and we are happy we were able to have the experience and grab a taste of Nebraska. The traditional Runza is made of ground beef, onion, and cabbage, and I think this is what the lady thought was the German ingredient. The concoction is stuffed into what looks like a hotdog bun. With the lobby closed, we devoured our hot sandwiches in the car, starved by the time we got them as we allowed our hunger to build should these things seriously grab our taste buds. Would we return? Yes.

Our lodging was at a Quality Inn near Interstate 80, where we spent the somewhat outrageous sum of $108 for the night; I didn’t want any weird surprises this evening. Upstairs, we were asleep in minutes.