Stop Before You Cross the Border

Today I start my 49th residency, which is the final residency of my 18 month TADventure (it's like adventure but for TADs). Yesterday was not technically my final drive day of the tour since I will be making the pilgrimage back to Missoula next weekend but it was my final drive day to a residency. It was also the longest drive day I've had in a while because all I've been doing for the past six weeks was zig-zagging back and forth across Wisconsin and I'd gotten quite spoiled. I suffered from some serious drive day delirium yesterday as we drove over 500 miles from Mondovi to Cavalier, ND which is where I am now.

I shall now rewind and begin at the beginning. We left Mondovi early in the morning and made a stop at Dunkin Donuts in Eau Claire. This will be the final Dunkin run of the tour since both North Dakota and Montana are embarrassingly Dunkin-less! And we drove...

I did some work while Jas drove but it was pretty boring for the most part and then it was my turn to drive and things got even more dull from there because we'd reached the flat part of the drive. Minnesota is flat. North Dakota is flat. These are facts.

No one, however, has ever been more excited than I was yesterday to cross the border into North Dakota because it meant that we were closer to our final destination (we'd reached the five-six hour mark in our drive at that point). I actually cheered.

We had planned a stop in Grand Forks, which is the largest town before Cavalier. I didn't see a grand fork while I was there but I did see a Tim Horton's! Oh Tim Horton's -- Canada's Dunkin! The life force of my Canadian tour! We stopped there for lunch. Jas had never been to Tim Horton's before and is now a changed man!

But, we still weren't in Cavalier. We had another 70 miles to go. And those 70 miles were north. Cavalier is just 10 miles shy of the Canadian border. I can basically see Canada from my homestay... It was to the point where I'm pretty sure the GPS's directions were just going to be "stop before you cross the border." The GPS didn't actually say that, but I did and I thought it was funny.

15 minutes from town, I experience such drive day delirium that I started laughing to the point of crying about the dead bugs on our windshield. Weird, I know. But it's what happens when you're in the truck that long. Jas and I did discuss how on our first long drive together, neither one of us got as weird as we did yesterday because we'd both been on our best behavior. We've moved past that, thankfully.

When we got here, I decided to see the sights. It didn't take very long. Cavalier is smalllllllll. The extra Ls are required for dramatic effect. It isn't as small as other towns that I've visited but it is still small and has a dusty feeling that one might expect if one was expecting a stereotypical town in the plains. Strangely enough, I was wearing my Chinook sugarbeaters shirt (gray shirt with the neon orange logo of Chinook, MT, whose school mascot is an actual beat) and discovered that Cavalier's mascot is an equally vivid shade of orange, except they aren't a vegetable, they're a natural disaster -- The Cavalier Tornadoes.

After that, Jas and I hung out at our homestay and I delighted in the fact that the sun doesn't set until 9pm here.