Road trip-day three

Well, here we are in Minneapolis. It was a mostly uneventful drive from Murdo, South Dakota. We had stayed up late the night before, so we slept in, went for a walk and then hit the road.

We crossed over the Missouri River on the Lewis and Clark Memorial Bridge.



Here is a not-so-great picture of the river and the bridge. I took the picture from a park at a rest stop/visitors' center after we crossed the river. I wanted to go out past the edge of the park and into some low underbrush to get a better picture that showed the whole bridge, but a nearby sign changed my mind.



We left the rollings hills and by the time we reached Minnesota we were out onto the broad, flat plains. It was windy today, and on the plains, the wind can really get going. We had to be careful when we opened the car doors at gas stations and rest stops because the wind would try to whip the doors open. It isn't as windy or as flat in Minneapolis as it was out on the open plains.

It's planting season here in Minnesota. We saw lots of huge corn planters- 24 rows wide- pulled by big tractors. I remember driving the cab tractor for O and Uncle Charlie, pulling the roller to get a field ready to plant. We thought it was a nice, good-sized tractor, but these were bigger. The fields in Scott Valley were smaller. There are thousands of acres in the valley, but they are all divided into fields that were 40, 80 or maybe 100 acres in size. Here the fields went on, unbroken and undivided, for farther than you could see sometimes.

As we were driving along through corn country (acually still in South Dakota), I saw something strange in the distance that seemed to rise up out of a corn field. Whatever it was, it was big. Finally we were close enough to see that is was a massive steel sculpture. I grabbed my camera, held it out the window (at 75 mph) and snapped a shot as we went past. It was pretty cool. I don't know whether a sculptor made a deal with a farmer or a farmer earns a living growing corn and feeds his soul sculpting/welding steel during the winter, but there is was. You can get an idea of how big it is if you compare the sculpture to the size of the fences nearby. I didn't notice the giant hammer until after we were past. It was the bull's head that got my attention from several miles away. There were several other smaller sculptures around the big ones, but you can't really see them in this picture. Pretty cool!



Tomorrow we will go for our morning walk at the Mall of America and then go to the St. Paul temple. Then it will be time to get ready for my conference.