DAY FIVE: Merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along, Merrily we roll along, across the Dakota plains. Another picture perfect day. Sound boring? Not at all. As we were about 3/4 the way across ND, we came to the part of the country that NatGeo recently reported is the new oil fracking site in N America. There is enough oil below the prairies to make the US oil independent, and there are signs all over of the "black gold" being prospected by major oilers. It's hard to imagine that these pumping stations, oil storage holding tanks, big rig truckers charging up and down the dirt roads, and the mile long trains hauling oil will be are future of this area. This production has helped to make ND have the lowest unemployment in the US. On the other hand, I imagine the people who live here can see their beautiful landscape change daily as more and more oil is sucked out of the land. The landowners do not have much of say in this matter. According to ND law, the property owners have rights to minerals, etc. a few hundred feet below the topsoil. Anything further down belongs to the state.

It's uncanny to see the haphazard arrangement of RV campers in the oil company worksites and flimsy modular homes that have been "lego-ed" together, all to house the workers who have migrated from all over the country.There are literally thousands of these temporary houses. The tankers racing to and fro along parts of Hwy 2 make MI's I-94 look like a pleasant country drive. Fortunately, the area of fracking does not cover too large a portion of the north western section of the state, at this time.

We don't mean for this to sound sourly negative. It's just a fact of life out here in western ND. It's much like the drastic changes that followed with the gold rush, e.g. in the 1890's San Francisco had a population of 800 pre-gold discovery and 36, 000 in the post.

Today we've traversed our first bouts of road construction. Only one section stopped us for about 15 minutes for road paving; probably a portent of the future in the days ahead. Some bumpy roads, but no permafrost.

There's lots of lazy black angus (can I say that?) cattle all over the countryside. They present a beautiful contrast to the emerald green of the fields and the topaz blue of the many, many small and large lakes that dot this highway. It will be interesting to see how far into Montana this prairie scenery goes . We will be spending the evening somewhere in "big sky country", and looking forward to seeing night's stars. Many years ago we camped in western MT and the star-scape was indescribable. Hopefully, we'll have a clear night.

Little Einstein scoots along zippity-quick like he
was made for the long haul.