Our day in Plaza

It is so funny to hear my cousin talk about the horrible traffic here nowadays. He says, “you have to look both ways, sometimes 3 ways before you can drive!” If we saw three cars or trucks in a mile, that meant it was a lot of traffic. They are used to being totally alone on the roads. The roads are dirt and gravel and the county maintains them by regrading twice a month. Denny drove 50 mph over washboard bumps. He had a 4 wheel drive Jeep and we drove right out into the fields and zoomed along over lots of bumps. It was amazing.






Mom had so much fun showing us all the interesting things around here. We saw the farm Dad grew up on, the farm where she was born, the school where she taught briefly, lots of oil wells including two that belong to my cousin. One of his oil wells is on land my Dad sold very cheap to my uncle and Denny bought it later. Mom said, “this could have been my oil well if Palmer (my Dad) hadn’t given his land away.” The ND inheritance was always a bone of contention between my folks. Dad thought they should just get rid of that “worthless” land. Mom said, “you can do what you want with your land, but I’m keeping mine and someday it will be worth something.”



It is very interesting to see how they seismograph the area, then set up stakes where they will drill the wells, then the set up of the drill. Then finally they have the pump in and you will always see a flame where the natural gas is being burned off. There is no infrastructure to use the natural gas--no pipeline for it. So it is just being wasted by a very pretty flame that is burning it off. Someday they hope to have a pipeline for the natural gas, but for now the oil is more important to the companies and they are having trouble keeping up with putting in the oil pipelines.














Looking in the phone book was a hoot--Plaza has 2.5 pages of names, Parshall has 5 pages, and New Town, where Denny and Sandy now live at the “lake house” more “in town”, has 10 pages. They really went big time when they moved from the farm in Plaza to New Town, but they really don’t like all the “traffic”.

Something that really bothered me was that all the wonderful old farm houses are not taken care of. Instead of fixing them up, they burn them and bring in a double or triple-wide “modular” home (we used to call them mobile homes). Nobody is a builder nearby, and they love to have their new home go in instantly, so ‘modular’ it is. There are some beautiful old houses that are going to ruin because they prefer the modular homes to working on fixing the old ones.

My Mom is a pie addict. We drove 40 min. to get Juneberry pie. Mmmmmmmm good! Not only had we never tasted Juneberries, but had never heard of them. They grow wild in ND and are worth the trip just to taste them. They look like a blueberry but taste more like a blackberry or marionberry, very few tiny seeds. Yummm. On the way back, a new hatch of bugs hit the CR-V windshield. Sounded like a sudden rainstorm, but when it ended the windshield was covered in dead bugs and no rain in sight.

Gary got a real education when we went out to dinner in the nicest restaurant around, the Scenic. It served basic food in a room that is very basic. I can’t think of any place I’ve ever eaten that looks like this in the Sacramento area. We have eaten out at 3 different places here and all serve the pop in cans. I haven’t seen one tablecloth. The food is good, but very plain.

The wind is something else. Always seems to be blowing hard. I can see why you would never want to have a haircut that had to be just so if you live here. You not only need wash and wear hair, but a cut that can blow and still look decent.

Montrail County, where Plaza is located, is a very patriotic area and very Republican. A high percentage of the kids go into the military from this county. You see a lot of American flags flying on the farms. My cousin commented that he feels very fortunate to have grown up in the small farming community of Plaza. He’d never want to live anywhere else. Everyone knows everybody and they help each other. I can see the attraction. I know the snow is hard, but they don’t mind it. At the Høstfest we met more than one person who had moved back to Minot from California when they retired because they like the warmth of the people in the area.

So for all of you who wondered why in the world we’d want to see North Dakota, we are so glad we came and we loved every minute we were in the state.