I Wonder as I Wander…

Minot ND is a city out in the middle of North Dakota. That sounds like an oxymoron since Garrison Keillor just said the population of ND is dispersed 9.6 people per square mile. So to have a ‘city’ in the middle of it, takes some of those 9.6 people from the country. But I love Minot. It’s nicknamed “The Magic City” and it really is. There is a wonderful Scandinavian park right in the middle where the “Norsk Hostfest is held every October (and thousands visit).

We visited Minot a few weeks ago. It’s amazing that you’re driving across the flatlands of North Dakota and suddenly you come to some rolling hills and down in the valley is the city of Minot.

Of course the real reason that I love visiting Minot is because I have family living there. Our three godchildren (niece and nephews: LeAnn, Scott and Kevin) and their families live right neat Minot and my sister lives fairly close (by ND miles) by. After we got to Minot, we went out for supper with Scott, Stacy and Dylan and visited with them for a while. I wish I had half of the energy that Dylan has. He is four years old and the cutest motormouth that you ever saw.

On Friday, we met up with LeAnn and after overeating at a Chinese buffet, we went to her house and picked tons of apples—maybe not tons, but we had ten 13-gal garbage bags pretty close to full. We decided to try the 'shake the tree' method with LeAnn wielding a huge fishing net and Bob a garbage bag to catch the apples. I climbed up the tree and gave it a good hard shake. Apples went everywhere—some out into the street—which is on a hill--so they rolled down the street. When we were leaving, we noticed apples along the edge of the street for two full blocks.

We were driving our little Focus and it was full to the brim with apples and our luggage. While we were picking apples, I must have stepped in some doggy ‘bombs’. There sure was a horrible smell in the car. So we had to stop and clean out my shoes.

We drove up to Sandy & Al’s Ranch and immediately started dehydrating apples. Sandy gave me a really nice dehydrator for an early Christmas president. So we had two dehydrators with 9 racks on each. We had it down to an art—the apple peeler spewing peelings all over, cinnamon and sugar flying, buckets of apple cores and peels going out to the chickens and baggies of dried apples filling up. I think we could fill up all the racks in about an hour.

Sandy and I visited one of their ‘favorite’ stores. It has lots of slightly damaged things—really cheap. I brought a $20 bill with me, so I wouldn’t get too carried away. I was mentally keeping track of how much I was getting and I figured it was about $18.70. When the lady rang it up—she kept saying “This is on sale”, so my total came to $13.50. There were watermelons on sale for $.20 a pound so I got a 30 lb one and it took my last $6.

We had a great time and ended up leaving with 10 baggies full of dehydrated apples, a bunch of squash, peppers (red, green, and hot, hot), pumpkins, eggplants, and two bushels of apples. We brought part of a bushel to Kara to dehydrate and finished up the rest at home. We also brought some of the veggies to Ross and Kara—and the hot peppers to Richard and Paul.

It’s always so wonderful to visit family.