July 14 Day 44 Fargo
Everyone's been waiting for us to wind up at the emergency room. Now we've made that trip, but not the way I expected. More later.
We checked out the tiny farmer's market. Little jars of juneberry and chokecherry jam demanded to be purchased. lrjoppa@aol.com if you want to order some for yourself.
We pedaled across the Red River to Moorhead, Minnesota, to check out the Scandanavian Heritage Center. There are two principal exhibits, each of which is a monument to the danger of having too much time on your hands. One is the Hjemkomest boat. A high school counselor spent time in the hospital recovering from a fall. He got to thinking that it would be fun to build a replica of a Viking boat in some museum in Norway and sail it to Norway. He figured that it would take him two years. Nine years later, he broke open one wall of the former potato warehouse he used as a shipyard to truck the boat to Lake Superior. He lived just long enough to see the boat in the water. His children carried on the project. They recruited a Norwegian ship captain familiar with the way the ancient ships sailed and gathered a volunteer crew. After a storm on Lake Superior, one of the crew abandoned the project, explaining "I have a five-year-old son at home." He wanted to be alive for the kid. A fourteen-foot crack opened in the bottom during a North Atlantic storm. They stuffed burlap into the crack until the leak was down to what they could bail. They made it to Norway. The other exhibit is a 70-foot-tall replica of a twelfth century church in Sweden, board for board, carving for carving. A guy saw another replica elsewhere in the Dakotas and decided, "What the hell. I'm not busy." and built it with his own hands.
We watched Harry Potter in the afternoon. Michele concluded by then that she had a urinary tract infection so we tootled over to the Merit Hospital emergency room, conveniently located across the street from our motel. We highly recommend the Merit Hospital emergency room's courteous and effective staff. Minimal waiting and even less paperwork. Try it the next time you're in Fargo.