Despite the fact that Gerry’s was the first flight out of Milwaukee on Wednesday morning, it still managed to be delayed long enough that he’d miss his connecting flight in Minneapolis. Kevin and Scott were also connecting through Minneapolis, but arrived to find that Gerry wasn’t there. Mark had picked up a rental car from the crack staff (foreshadowing) at Hertz in Minneapolis earlier in the morning. Since we’d be wrapping up the trip in Minneapolis, the idea was to pick up the car and drop it off at the same airport in order to get a cheaper rate. He was about 100 miles into his drive to meet what he thought would be the rest of the foursome at Fargo airport which, by the way, has only 5 gates - that’s only 4 more than were on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs. It was Kevin and Scott, calling to see how receptive Mark might be to turning around and waiting with the two of them for Gerry to arrive in Minneapolis, then driving together to Fargo. Mark was about as receptive as one might be to a surprise colonoscopy. So Kevin and Scott flew ahead, as planned, to Fargo and, along with Mark, would meet up with Gerry at Newman Outdoor Field when he arrived that evening.
For those who may never have seen the movie Fargo, it is about a small-time shyster who hatches a money-making scheme that involves hiring two thugs to kidnap his own wife. Things begin to spin wildly out of control when one of the thugs shoots a state trooper. Ultimately one of the thugs winds up killing the other and disposing of him using a woodchipper (in other words, it’s a grate film). Well, the fact that that very woodchipper is now on display at the Fargo-Moorhead Visitors Center made the choice of our first destination in Fargo an easy one. In fact, you might say there wasn’t a shred of doubt. The center’s attendant even gave us a great suggestion for lunch: the aptly named Beer & Fish Co. We can confirm that it served both.
Next on the day one agenda was the Hjemkomst Center, technically in Moorhead, Minnesota, but sitting right next to the river that divides Minnesota from North Dakota. It shares its name, which means “homecoming” in Norwegian, with a replica of a Viking ship constructed between 1974 and 1980 and modeled after a ship that was discovered in Norway in 1880. The guy who conjured up the idea of constructing this thing and floating around Lake Superior in it, Robert Asp, had to have been just a bubble off plumb. But after he died in 1980, it was his family that proved to be complete lunatics by actually sailing this monstrosity from Duluth, Minnesota to Oslo, Norway. We can barely survive 4 and a half days in an SUV stopping at baseball parks and quirky roadside attractions, let alone 3 months on open seas, once having to repair a 14-foot long storm-induced crack in the hull.
Since this is a baseball trip, here’s a riddle: what 9-man squad took 7 years before being caught stealing? Turns out it’s not a baseball team at all, but rather the 9 thieves who were charged in June 2023 with the July 2016 pilfering of Roger Maris’ 1960 MVP Award and Hickok Belt (awarded to the best professional athlete of 1961) from the museum of Fargo’s favorite son, inconspicuously located in the West Acres Shopping Center. That was our next stop, where, sure enough, there were the vacant spots where the plaque and belt used to be, with a note denouncing the “brazen thieves” who committed this “disgraceful act”. So many questions. These nitwits cut the belt in half and melted down the plaque. Why? And how did it take 9 guys to steal two small items from what amounts to a retail display case? Fargo meets Mall Cop meets Ocean’s Eleven.
Roger Maris is best known for the 61 times he went deep in 1961. Less discussed is the last time he went deep in 1985…six feet deep in Holy Cross Cemetery, to be specific. With some time to blow before the Lincoln Saltdogs vs. Fargo-Moorhead Redhawks that evening, we paid a visit to his grave, appropriately marked with a diamond-shaped headstone at which visitors had left a glove, a ballcap, a number of baseballs, and a few golf balls. Still looking to burn some clock before the ballgame, we found a bar near the ballpark called Herd & Horns. We can confirm that it served neither.
It was a large and early-arriving crowd at the ballpark for the “Championship Baseball Giveaway”. Apparently the Redhawks won the inaugural championship of the American Association of Professional Baseball in 2022, though you wouldn’t have known it by the 10-1 thumping that the Saltdogs put on them this night. The game had two memorable highlights. First, visiting manager Brett Jodie got ejected for arguing that a successful pickoff should have been called a balk and, in so-doing, using an f-word that was decidedly not “Fargo”. Second, Gerry finally arrived, after a day spent using the same non-Fargo word to describe his airline and pondering whether Delta is a portmanteau word meaning “delivered tardy”.
A 90-minute drive followed the game so that we could start fresh Thursday morning in Jamestown, ND. Why Jamestown, you ask? Well, because every one of our trips must feature at least one freakishly large statue, and Jamestown is the home to the World’s Largest Buffalo Monument (in all caps – that’s the official name).
To build the excitement to a fever pitch, we started with breakfast at the Depot Café. Our waitress had that distinctive northern Midwest accent, where an answer in the affirmative is pronounced “yaw” and reinforced with “you betcha”. It was also pretty clear that literally every other patron knew each other, so when we walked in, we got that quizzical “You ain’t from around these parts, are ya?” look that is usually reserved for sideshow carnies and suspected felons. Clear across the other side of the thriving Jamestown metroplex (a drive of 7 minutes) was Dakota Thunder, the alternative name of the 26-foot high, 60-ton steel and gunite buffalo. It was dedicated in 1960 and, since Wikipedia notes that it is anatomically correct, we can confidently assert that it was erected in 1959. We spent just a short time there, long enough to get a few pictures underneath the World’s Largest Buffalo naughty parts, and then it was bye-bye bison.
On the way to Fort Abraham Lincoln State Park, Scott raised the philosophical question “How will BIB end?” Death of a member? A health condition that renders one of us unfit for travel and leaves the group unable to reach its 4-person quorum? Kevin suggested that it might end like the series finale of Newhart in 1990, where Gerry wakes up next to his first wife, Sue, and realizes the last third-of-a-century has all been a bizarre dream. Over the last 33 years, we’ve spent a lot of time pondering windups, but not a lot of time pondering wind downs. T.S. Eliott would no doubt say that BIB will end not with a bang, but a whimper, but we prefer to think that it will end with something of proportions that are more, well, BIBlical.
Two memories will stick with us from Fort Abraham Lincoln. One was the story documented in the visitor center of a laundress at the fort in the mid 1870’s known as “old Nash”. She was extraordinarily popular, though, it was noted, “not known for her external beauty”. While at the fort, she married her fourth husband, a Sergeant John Noonan who, we must conclude, had to have been a few peas short of a casserole. Only upon the death of Old Nash was it revealed that she was actually a man. A reporter quoted Sergeant Noonan, shortly after her death, as remaining adamant that he didn’t know his wife was a man. In fact, he said, they had been trying very hard to have a baby.” Dances with Wolves meets The Crying Game.
The second memorable experience involved the meticulously recreated “On-A-Slant Indian Village” that existed for nearly 200 years prior to the fort’s being settled there. It was so meticulously recreated that we were all nearly asphyxiated by the not-so-well-ventilated bonfire inside one of the five earthlodges (think big mud huts). Given that General George Armstrong Custer was the first commander of Ft. Abraham Lincoln, one can’t help but wonder if it was really a bullet that took him down at Little Big Horn, or just a latent case of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Two hours west of Fort Abraham Lincoln was the Painted Canyon Overlook in the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, on the upper margin of the Badlands. It served as the starting point for a guided (by Mark, who had visited not too long ago) tour of the park’s wildlife. We enjoyed the vast prairie dog towns and a 0.4 mile walk to a ridge overlooking the Little Missouri River. The best we could do though in terms of bison, the main attraction, was to see a few from several hundred yards away. Bison experience rating: Fair.
The lunch selection was Culvers, completing the Custer and Custard tandem by mid-day. It was on the drive afterward toward Rapid City, South Dakota that we encountered a long stretch of highway that had just been through grinding in advance of being repaved and was pelting our SUV with debris. Lots of it. No one has been more sick of pebbles constantly in their face since Bamm-Bamm. Somewhere along this drive, we first noticed about a four-inch crack in the upper driver’s side windshield. This was to become our journey’s equivalent of the Hiemkomst storm-induced crack in the hull. On a positive note, we did drive past quite a few fenced-in buffalo close to the road. Bison experience rating: Good.
With the crack growing…five inches…six inches…seven inches, we called an audible and diverted ourselves through Sturgis, just to see what all the fuss is about. The 2023 motorcycle rally had just ended less than a week earlier and you could tell. The place looked rough…like the Keith Richards of small towns. Finally arriving in Rapid City, we had a rare opportunity for a dinner that was not in a ballpark, so we selected a place called Minervas. It probably says something about us that our idea of upscale dining is a place attached to a Best Western. Nevertheless, they had a bison steak wrapped in bacon that was to die for. Bison experience rating: Delicious.
On the drive to Rapid City, Gerry had taken to the internet to study the options for slowing the growth of a windshield crack. Evidently, finding a Hertz location to swap out the car was not one of them. Instead, after dinner, we stopped at Walmart, where Gerry procured Super Glue, clear tape, cleaning fluid, and some paper towels (this probably would have been the first choice of the crew on the Hjemkomst, but for the fact that there are no Walmarts on the open seas). Now we had all the raw materials we needed to deal with the windshield crack and have enough left over to take a hostage or two, secure them to their chairs, and scrub the crime scene.
Friday morning, Gerry decided to: 1) get up early, 2) Super Glue the windshield crack, and 3) gas up the SUV. Under the heading of “no good deed goes unpunished”, Gerry somehow inadvertently hit the windshield wipers somewhere between steps 2 and 3. With goop now essentially everywhere, one could just imagine the wipers getting permanently glued to the windshield at about a 45-degree angle so that our SUV would look like a surprised Eugene Levy to anyone who saw us coming in their rear-view mirror. Instead, we hit up another Walmart on the way to Mt. Rushmore for Goo Gone, razor blades and more paper towels. If Walmart tracks purchases across locations, Gerry has to be on some kind of terrorist watch list.
Mt. Rushmore was next on the agenda. There’s something peculiar about seeing four men, framed by ponderosa pine trees in the Black Hills of South Dakota, permanently associated with one another and motionless for decades. You could tell that’s what the guy was thinking who we asked to take our picture. Only about 9 miles away was our next stop at Crazy Horse, more or less a poor man’s Mt. Rushmore. Mt. Rushmore took 14 years to carve. When Crazy Horse was started, it was estimated that it would take 30 years to complete. It is now 75 years in and it is currently estimated that just the hand, arm, shoulder, hairline, and top of the horse's head will take until 2037. There is no set date for it to be totally completed, though some have speculated that it might take another 50 years. By that time, BIB will have, in fact, ended (though we still don’t know how); nuclear holocaust may have left the earth void of all life forms except cockroaches and Cher; and our SUV’s windshield still will have traces of Super Glue.
On the way to Sioux City, we paused for a second consecutive lunch at Culvers, as the temperature outside reached 103 degrees – hard to believe given that just a couple of days earlier, the stiff breeze in Fargo had made it seem almost chilly. Meanwhile, our crack had grown to over a foot in length, so we broke out the clear tape for the first time. It didn’t do anything to slow the crack-creep, but it did make for a nice distraction in Mark’s sightline as he was driving.
We mentioned earlier that every one of our trips must feature at least one freakishly large statue. Well, this trip actually featured a colossi trifecta. The next was the Dignity of Earth and Sky on the eastern banks of the Missouri River in Chamberlain, South Dakota. The 50-foot tall Native American woman was completed in 2016 and wears a quilt over her shoulders with 128 stainless steel blue diamond shapes. While Wikipedia claims that three Native American women from Rapid City served as models for the sculpture, that seems unlikely, since the statue has neither three heads nor six arms.
Between the Dignity statue and a ballgame in Sioux Falls, we made a short detour to see “The World’s Only Corn Palace” (as if the world needed more than one) in Mitchell, South Dakota. It’s a genuine sports and events center that happens to be covered in murals and patterns that are made from corn and other grains, with a new design constructed each year. It has actually been the source of some controversy, as it has received Department of Homeland Security funding on several occasions, including in 2009 to protect a "new Fiberglass statue of the Corn Palace mascot Cornelius" across the street. A-maize-ing. Has DHS lost its last kernel of common sense? And exactly who would attack a corn palace? Orville Redenbacher?
At Sioux Falls Field, a.k.a., the Bird Cage, we continued with our avian theme (recall our first game was at the Fargo-Moorhead Redhawks) by watching the Sioux Falls Canaries drop a 5-0 shutout on the Sioux City Explorers. Like Gerry says, why settle for one Sioux, when you can have two? It was a rare 117-pitch complete game shutout for Canary pitcher Seth Miller. There was a lot to keep us entertained between mascot Harry Canary, the fact that it was St. Patrick’s Day night at the ballpark (complete with green beer), multiple visiting coaches’ being ejected, and the former owner sitting right next to us and chatting us up for much of the night.
Saturday began at the Original Pancake House, where Kevin somehow nearly choked to death…on a sip of water. His perfectly executed spit take nearly provided an answer to the question “How might BIB end?” that would have been the perfect BIB-esque mix of macabre and hilarious.
Our first stop after we crossed back into Minnesota was our third freakishly large statue, this time the 55-foot tall Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, Minnesota, which is currently the tenth tallest free-standing statue in the United States. We can happily report that, unlike the World’s Largest Buffalo, JGG is NOT anatomically correct. No asparagus and brussels sprouts to have to edit out of photos. Nevertheless, when we asked a teen-age girl to take our picture under the statue, she took us a little too literally by taking a landscape orientation picture of the four of us straddled by two giant green feet. After we had a good laugh looking at the photos, we had a more seasoned photographer (read “older guy”) take a couple more in portrait mode that captured both us and the totality of the giant leafy fella.
Having stopped at attractions representing two of the basic food groups, grains (Corn Palace) and vegetables (Jolly Green Giant), we moved on to a protein-themed stop at the SPAM Museum in Austin, Minnesota, home to Hormel’s headquarters. This is the type of museum that is right in our wheelhouse: quirky and free. The workers are called SPAMbassadors, for Pete’s sake. Betcha didn’t know that SPAM comes in far more flavors than you ever dreamed (and seriously, if you dream about SPAM, it’s time to see a therapist). There are “regular” flavors like teriyaki, jalapeno, hickory smoke, and bacon that are plenty offbeat, but it’s the seasonal flavors like figgy pudding and pumpkin spice that really peg the weird-o-meter. We also learned that SPAM as a term for unwanted emails originated with a Monty Python skit about a restaurant that served nothing but SPAM. Naturally, the first thing we did upon walking outside was find a place for lunch around the corner that served – what else? – SPAMburgers.
With some time to blow once we arrived in the Twin Cities, we headed for the Mall of America, which consists of 4 floors, each of which is a rectangle with a perimeter of a little over a mile surrounding an indoor amusement park. It also happens to be built on the sight of the old Metropolitan Stadium that was home to both the Minnesota Twins and Minnesota Vikings from 1961 to 1981. The Twins connection is memorialized by a plaque on the site where home plate used to be and a chair bolted to a wall where Harmon’s Killebrew’s stadium record 522-foot home run landed in 1967. So it once was a ballpark and is now an amusement park. But park is also a verb, and trying to do so on the day we visited was like participating in the Hunger Games. And if that wasn’t enough to fry our nerves, there were easily thousands of kids inside the place. We snapped our pictures of the home plate plaque and Killebrew home run chair and ran from the place like Indiana Jones fleeing the temple with the golden idol in the Opening Scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
On our way to CHS Field to watch the Triple-A St. Paul Saints, we did a driving tour of the Cathedral of St. Paul (after which the city is named) and the Minnesota State Capitol. Maybe we should have said a prayer for the Saints at the former. They lost 5-4 to the Indianapolis Indians, as a comeback came up just short. The Saints have a colorful history, having been owned from their inception in 1993 through 2023 by a group that included Bill Murray and Mike Veeck, son of Bill Veeck. Both father and son have been known for their outlandish promotions. While the move from being an Independent League team to a Triple-A franchise has forced the Saints to temper some of their more outlandish stunts (for example, you can no longer get a massage from a nun, Sister Rosalind, who was once shut down by the vice squad - you can look it up), there was still plenty to love. Looking for a ball pig (a real one) to make deliveries to the umpire? Check. Feel the need to see two people dressed as giant eyeballs racing toward a toilet paper finish line? Gotcha covered. How about a contest throwing produce from the second deck into a grocery cart on the concourse? An unsuspecting Gerry and Kevin almost got killed because of that one, first by a tater that was not of the home run variety, and then by nearly taking a melon to the melon. Then there was the P.A. announcer: “Hey section 112, you look great [crowd in that section screams]. How are the kids?”; [with Indians batter at the plate] “batter has 2 strikes and no balls”; and [following Indians home run] “Yeah, whatever.”
A lot of things came in 2’s on this trip: Culvers lunches, cities named Sioux, and now breakfast at The Original Pancake House, as we found one in Minnesota on Sunday morning. This, of course, begs the question, how can the one in South Dakota and the one in Minnesota both be The Original Pancake House? Someone is peddling flapjack fraud.
Sunday morning’s big event was a tour of Paisley Park, recording studio and home of the late artist, Prince. Kevin broke out a purple polo for the occasion. Sadly, no raspberry beret to go with it. Scott had to reserve a time for our tour in advance, and it became obvious why when we arrived. The place was locked down tighter than Mark’s buttocks in the Pennsylvania mineshaft ride. First, it was gated and you needed your tour time to get in. Then there was an enormous 8-foot square man (we’ll call him Thor) guarding the entrance, who looked like he might eat his young. His job was to not let us in until our appointed tour time. While we waited for permission to enter, Kevin returned to the SUV to get something he’d forgotten. More precisely, he returned to someone else’s SUV and then couldn’t figure out why the trunk wouldn’t open. In his defense, it was a similarly sized, if entirely different color, SUV (as opposed to, say, a little red Corvette). When Thor finally let us in, we had to not only turn off and surrender our phones, but turn off our smartwatches as well. Our actual tour guide, Margot, was the metaphorical photo-negative of Thor. She was a small woman, who was unnaturally enthusiastic about Prince and couldn’t wait to get us inside to share her excitement about walking the same hallways that Prince once walked, even though she’s undoubtedly done so hundreds of time, not counting the times she’s done it in her dreams.
The final act of BIB 2023, at least with all of us still present, was to watch the Twins lose a perfect game with one out in the 7th inning (on a completely catchable fly ball, nonetheless), though they still captured a 2-0 win over the Pirates at Target Field.
1,700 miles after we started, after dropping Mark off at his hotel, all that remained was for Kevin to drop off Gerry and Scott for their flights and return the rental, now sporting a crack that was about a foot and a half in length and enough residual glue to make it look like we were trying to hide whatever we’d done to it. Fortunately, there was no attendant when he returned the SUV, so he was able to drop it off and bolt, leaving Mark to deal with the call from Hertz: “uh…about the windshield on that vehicle you rented from us…” It would have been completely in keeping with the Fargo theme for one of us to get detained for vandalizing the SUV, have the situation spin out of control, and Mark somehow get arrested for insurance fraud. Maybe that’s how BIB eventually ends.
