Not Even Not Traveling 46: North Dakota I

The Last Three Continental States

June 25 - July 3, 2024

North Dakota I

Tuesday, June 25

We flew into Minneapolis on a cramped Southwest flight to meet our friends Ann and Jon Pennington. Ann was the one who drove to pick us up. She soon offered her thoughts on M365 Power Programming, a subject in which she is expert and my institute is, by contrast, a year behind her while deliberately trying to acquire the same expertise.

So my vacation began with talk about work. I found it all very fun, fortunately. Ann revealed that her team succeeded at creating a tool my team needs. Her group's code is portable, too, so we soon weren't only talking about our work but venturing into the 'doing something about it' territory as I took notes. 

 

Later, we discovered one of my groups has been doing a lot of exploration and staff instruction on AI methods, which Ann and Jon both wanted to learn about. The three of us talked late into the night about trends in AI, the use-cases for it, the limitations of the training methods for all AIs, the dangers of overwriting learned skills, and the some of the faulty analogies being made to human learning.  

Wednesday, June 26

In the morning, Ann took us to get our rental car from Enterprise. As I drove away from the agency, my wife noticed something wrong with one of the turn signals. We continued to drive and test it and decided the left blinker was definitely not working. That was too bad because it was otherwise a nice Toyota luxury SUV, perfect for a trip across multiple, northern U.S. states. However, we had to turn around and drive back to the rental office.

The agency apologized although they seemed apoplectic about the fact they had sent this car to a repair shop precisely to have the turn signal fixed. They had assumed the work was done; but it wasn't. This got me to cyncically wondering if a repair shop, knowing they were repairing vehicles that usually wouldn't, really couldn't, ever come back might take shortcuts, They might even say they had done the job when they hadn't.

We had to trade down to a Hyundai SUV with less comfortable seats, fewer amenities, and so on. But all the critical parts of it worked. 

The Hjemkomst Ship

Well, we didn't visit it. We got a late start on the day, so we didn't see the viking ship replica. This happens to us all the time on long driving trips. We adjusted. And we had lunch. 

Fargo

Following the advice of the Penningtons, Diane and I stopped at Kroll's outside of Fargo, North Dakota. After a saurkraut omelete (well, that was just me), we picked a spot for a hike. This was going to be a vacation of parks and museums, or so we had planned, and the second park (after a Minneapolis park with Ann and her dogs) was Lindenwood on the east side of Fargo. 

Lindenwood has a weird bridge that looks like the designers decided to put a guillotine at each end. The mechanisms, upon closer inspection, must have been used to lower the bridge into place and maybe also to lift it out for repairs. The bridge is tiny. Guillotines might see more use than the drawbridge system.  

The North Dakota Heritage Center

We picked the Heritage Center museum because it was close and the timing worked out for us. Fortunately, it was a darned nice place. Although it aims at children for part of its audience (as many museums do), the center offered plenty of adult-level exhibits and instructions. We had the opportunity to learn about the Dakotas and their inhabitants. 

There were tribal exhibits, technical exhibits - including a missile launch system - social exhibits, and a few things that were reasonably unique. The North Dakota Heritage Center has a 'Dino Mummy.' It is one of the few recovered fossils on display in the world to show preserved dinosaur skin. 

This one is as scaly as movies would lead you to expect. The skin didn't show traits of being feathery.  

After the museum, we had to move on to Jamestown. There, we had to deal with a hotel cancelling our reservation due to construction on their site. We chose a local motel named Two Rivers. It was probably the worst place on our trip. Local is not always a good thing with motels. This one was dirty despite reeking of brutal cleansing agents someone had used to prepare the room. (No scrubbing involved, I would guess, just throwing buckets of cleanser around.) I decided to sleep in my clothes rather than let too much of the local sheets and/or insects climb on me during the night.