Day 16: Hartland, MN to Jamestown, ND

Woke up at some ungodly hour of the morning. Anna's classes had been cancelled the previous day so we didn't have to rush back that night, however in Minnesota it would take a blizzard of biblical proportions to shut them down for any more than a day. So we had to return the girl in time for her 10am class, which meant on the road by 7:30 at the latest.

First thing I did though was check for the latest news on the Christchurch earthquake, and by now pictures were starting to emerge and boy was it bad. Anna had come to the same conclusion; we knew it was bad the previous night, but had we had no idea just how bad it really was. A few more "I'm ok" messages had come in overnight so I was feeling a bit better about that at least.

We were soon on the road and heading out to the windfarm that had popped up down the road. Apparently when Anna returned from NZ she found that 250 wind turbines had sprouted up down the road!

We continued back and got on I35 again. It was much better this time, but that didn't stop the guy behind us from doing an utterly amazing spin out into the ditch; in my rear view mirror I could see him sliding along sideways, snow flying everywhere. I'm not even sure how he managed to end up like that, since we were doing just fine.

Fine that is until everything ground to a halt. Turns out there had been an accident, on the other side of the road. Huh!? There weren't even any emergency vehicles or police or even damage on our lanes, it was all taking place on the other side of the barrier, yet we were still at a standstill. Go figure.

Eventually we got to St Kates only a few minutes late, which was lucky. The amount of snow in the twin cities was way worse than back in Hartland, seems they got hit pretty hard up there.

I went for a bit of a drive and ended up going for a walk along the banks of the Mississippi River which was beautiful.

Pathway through the trees, several inches of snow on most trees / Frozen Mississippi River.

The houses along the river were all amazing, prices to match too no doubt.

And the street itself:

I got back to the car and discovered that I couldn't open it. Hmm. Remote wasn't working. Ok, used the emergency key hidden inside the remote open the car and as soon as I did the alarm went off. Sigh! Jumped in, shut the door and put the key fob in the ignition, which did the trick. Modern cars..! Opened up the remote and seems water had gotten in, corroded the battery and now the whole thing didn't work. Locking the car without the remote is a very complicated procedure: 1) turn off car. 2) Open drivers door, all other doors unlock automatically. 3) Shut drivers door. 4) Press the lock all doors button (if you do this while the door is open the alarm arms). 5) Open the drivers door again, hop out. 6) Remove the emergency key and use the tiny square of plastic to lock the door. Wow. Versus just pushing the 'arm' button the remote.

In the end I had to prise off the remote back, extract the batter, wash it out with isopropyl alcohol, let it dry for several days, then put it back together. Ulgh!

Having found a replacement battery I hit the road again and started heading west. Ahh the west, where all the best railroads live! Five and half hours later I was in Fargo, North Dakota. Yes the Fargo from the movie. It looks a little different these days:

Satisfied with Fargo I hit the road again and soon the sun was setting. The wind was pretty wicked out here and was blowing snow across the roadway, such that it looked like it was steaming. And with the low winter sunset… wow!

Eventually pulled into the town of Jamestown and found an immaculate independent motel for $35 a night. Apparently North Dakota have random motel inspections and if your motel is too dirty, you'll be closed down. Why oh why don't other states have this?! This motel had a perfect score and it showed! I was very impressed.

Turns out I'd be spending a couple of nights here; not part of the plan at all, especially with Montana knocking right next door. But in series of events almost not related to the earthquake at all, all the servers that I look after crashed and burned within 24 hours of the earthquake. As if there wasn't enough stuff going on already! So I cancelled my plans for the following day and spend an entire day hole up in the motel bringing a new server online, and discovering all sorts of things had gone wrong that I had no way to correct, what with being 13,000km away. And all my backups were offline, and this and that and the other thing. It was an extremely frustrating day!