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TRAVEL BLOG ENTRY
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“if you needed more towels all you had to do was go down to the lobby and get some more...” |
We were heading back to North Dakota but decided to head back through Kilarney, Canada. The town is totally Irish-themed and green. Every store, bar, and shop has some Irish reference, but doesn’t really have an Irish history that we could figure. The border patrol going back into the US was much more serious than the kid at the Peace Garden. The American men, armed, gave us the drill and kind of smirked with laughter when we told him we were checking out Killarney. He had us step out of the car while he searched our trunk. He quickly looked over things and sent us on our way after a scan of the trunk’s contents. From Canada we were going to head down to Devil’s Lake. We drove through the little town of Cando, home of Minnesota Vikings football star, Dave Osborne. The town’s motto is “You can-do better in Cando.” We learned from the community message board that the town meeting was coming up along with that week’s bingo schedule. The community message board is a blackboard that is updated regularly on the outside of the fire hall. The movie theater advertised the one weekly showing of the movie “Cars” would be that Saturday at 2:00. Like so many of the small towns we visited, arriving in Cando was like taking a step back in time. Things just move slower in towns like this but admittedly, I find these towns simple and welcoming.
Arriving in the town of Devil’s Lake, we were surprisingly welcomed by a very quaint and bustling town. The town of Devil’s Lake in fact, was one of the surprising that we found along our journey that we were not expecting. The town had small town American values like so many of the ones we visited. At the corners of 4th Street and 4th Avenue there were four American flags on each of the 4 corners of the streets along with the bulletin board in town recruiting men for a career in priesthood. We visited a beautiful coffee house called the Liquid Bean owned by a gentleman and his wife who have lived in the area their whole lives and claimed that the coffee house was the first in the state at 11 years old.
One of our favorite finds in Devil’s Lake was the City Center Hotel. While we were researching this town on the internet we found a review of this hotel in tripadvisor.com that was too funny. The gentleman who wrote the review loved the City Center Hotel because it had ice and towels and claimed that if you needed more towels all you had to do was go down to the lobby and get some more.
Devil’s Lake itself is a huge natural lake that has filled up and flooded many houses and streets in the past thirteen years thanks to an active aquifer. We were surprised how big it is and how high it is compared to the low Lake Sacagawea. The town and all the fishing spots around the town are surrounded by this lake and every time we turned a bend, there was more lake to see.
From the town of Devil’s Lake we headed onto the Sully’s National Game Refuge. We spent the afternoon there and enjoyed the beautiful loop drive and scenic overlooks. Along the way during the drive, we found a male elk right away standing on this little island in the middle of the lake. Throughout the day we spotted a Prairie Dog Town, a buffalo bull who was clearly miserable and hot who had probably been kicked out the herd, and then on the way into the new visitors center (the old one was flooded by the rising waters of the lake) we found the buffalo herd. Mothers, young ones, and calves were very entertaining as they found for cool spots on the ground. One calf made us laugh when he wouldn’t stop milking from his mom even to cross the road in front of us; he walked the whole way across still milking. The visitor’s center was lovely. It hosts Native American events and pow-wows outdoors there throughout the summer and spring.
On our way out of the park we found the male elk again, this time almost fully emerged in the cool water with a female. It was hot and cooling off in the lake makes them much smarter than the buffalo that just lay in the direct sun on a hot day like today.
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