Memories

I've heard it said 'you can never go back' referring to past times and happy happenings. I beg to differ! We may not be able to reenact the days and times we had but a visit is sometimes so well worth the effort that years can be washed away.

Such was the case on this trip. We went to visit my cousin, Jon, and his wife, Sheryl, in St. Paul, Minnesota on Friday. It had been about 41 years we figured since we have met. Yeah, we're older now and have been thru a lot of life, but with about 5 or 6 hours of chatting, we caught up on our families and just had a few laughs together. Very sweet!



From St. Paul, we headed due west and after a full day of driving, ended up in Bismarck, North Dakota. Even though it is the capital city, there was only one high rise building in the downtown area and that was the State Building. The grounds around there are meticulously maintained and beautiful.

There are a number of monuments and we walked around on Saturday evening reading about each one and enjoying the walk. (We may have been catching Pokémon also, but that's for another day :)








Here is a picture of a French Freedom Train and the shields represented by different areas. We couldn't find more info on this but it was covered and part of the stationary exhibits.










This monument had the names of all people that had fought and died in all the wars from ND. Very well done!

Note how green and lush the grass is too.








This sculpture was made from rebar...long steel bars used for reinforcing in concrete. There was no mention if this rebar was from some that was recycled or new but it was wonderfully crafted! A bonding theme for most of the sculptures was the celebration of settlers that traveled over the plains to settle in ND in the 1800's.





This statue is of John Burke, former US Treasurer from ND. The building in the background and the next picture is the tallest structure we saw. The front steps were being reworked so we weren't able to get close. The flowers in the foreground spelled out North Dakota.


















This is the State Library Building. Made of what looked like granite and sandstone, it makes quite an imposing statement!

We really enjoyed driving thru ND. It has a number of interesting areas to look at.

Clean air and blue skies. Hot too but that doesn't beat out interesting and pretty!