2005/08 Alaska Trip - The Island and home - Devil's Lake |
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We crossed the border into North Dakota at Northgate, a very quiet border spot. They seemed fascinated with us, and one guard did a walk-through search of the trailer. We expected him to ask about all the boxes and packages piled up in the bedroom, but he didn’t seem to notice them.
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The road home (Rugby and Devils Lake) |
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The North Dakota side of the border is also flat, but the crops are a little different, and we were soon driving past fields of sunflowers, mostly gone to seed. We stopped for lunch at a cemetery. Cemeteries are good stopping points as there’s plenty of parking and the townspeople don’t bother you as they think you’re visiting a grave. We’ve never had any trouble with the occupants either, but then we only stop in daylight. However, when we came to leave I noticed we had a soft tyre. I didn’t bother fixing it and just put the spare on. This was our sixth tyre problem of the summer.
Driving into our first town we noted that the price of gas was $3.54 a gallon, about the same price as in Canada, and about $1.20 more than back in June. I thought we’d misread $2.54, but we later found that this was a typical price, boosted by the impact of Katrina on the country’s refining capacity.
Our route took us through the towns of Minot and Rugby. Rugby, like its namesake in England, is a geographical 
centre. It is the centre of the North American continent. I don’t know why it’s useful to know that except to realize you’re a long way from the beach. However, it might be the most excitement they get in Rugby as they’ve erected a stone plinth to mark the spot.
I wanted to stop at a campground I’d found listed on Devil’s Lake, about 70 miles on, but either the directions were poor or someone had stolen all the street names. We ended up crossing a causeway into the Indian reservation and then followed a really bad washboard road. After all this I expected to get there and find that the campground had been closed for years, but it was open and full of trailers. 
Most of their business is with the locals who park their trailers there permanently, and they obviously come in from town on a different road! The owners were pleased to see a customer and assigned us a spot down on the lake shore. We watched the sun set behind a copse of drowned trees.
Devils Lake was settled over a hundred years ago and the locals noted that the lake was shrinking, and soon there was enough room to put another row of houses in front of the previous lakefront homes. Another thirty years, and there was room for another street. And so on, until very recent times when the lake began to grow again! It has tripled in size and come up twenty feet in the last ten years, causing the town to build a dyke and to move hundreds of houses. The recent solution has been to build an artificial outlet and slowly drain the lake into the Red River, donating the extra water to Manitoba.
The drowned trees are in a part of the campground that’s now under water. The owner said that the lake level seems to have stabilized now that the outlet’s operational.
Tuesday September 6th
We awoke to the sounds of crashing surf. Surf, in North Dakota? It was still warm, but the wind was shrieking over the lake and building big waves, wearing away even more of the campground’s territory. Even the rock causeway was taking a beating as it’s only a couple of feet above lake level.