Nebraska

"At the age of thirty-five one needs to go to the Moon, or some such place, to recapture some of the excitement with which one first landed at Calais." That was Evelyn Waugh in 1945, writing the foreword to 'When The Going Was Good', a compendium of his pre-war travel writing. The book is now out of print, because it's mostly Waugh's unexpurgated observations on the appearance and habits of the natives while travelling through Africa and South America.

I picked up a second-hand copy in Omaha, just by chance. Omaha is an unfashionable city in a mostly rural state, but the bookshop in question was still comfortably bigger and better-stocked with serious books than anything I've ever encountered in England. There's life in the republic yet.

Anyway, Waugh had a point, and recapturing excitement is especially hard in a place like Nebraska. There's not a whole lot going on. The only things I knew about Nebraska beforehand were a) it's the title of a Bruce Springsteen album, to which I've never listened, and b) in 'Big Bang Theory', the character Penny is from Nebraska, because it's a subtle way of showing that she's from...nowhere.

Some valuable travel advice, if you ever find yourself driving past Lincoln, Nebraska: keep driving. Omaha is nice though. I stayed in a fairly funky suburb called Dundee which was full of nice eateries and general leafy pleasantness. Then I picked up another rental car, and took off. Out in the wide open spaces - and by heck there are plenty of them - one finds interesting natural rock formations, one of which is pictured. And also there's CarHenge. It's a thing. Again, see picture.

I've got the car for a little while yet. Nebraska isn't the only big flat pile of nothing around here. Stay tuned for more quiveringly exciting updates from me.

Downtown Omaha

Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, Omaha
No particular significance - I just like the way the photo came out.

Smoking and morbid obesity are both absolutely fine and don't let anybody tell you otherwise

Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln

CarHenge
It's a full-scale Stonehenge replica. All these cars are real, including the upright ones.
Some people just have too much time on their hands.

Chimney Rock

Edd vs Food #107
eCreamery, 5001 Underwood Avenue, Dundee, Omaha
Ice cream sandwich (identical cookie underneath) with sprinkles

Des Moines, Iowa

"I come from Des Moines," Bill Bryson once wrote. "Somebody had to."

It's actually quite a nice city, and I can imagine that living here would be perfectly pleasant. But I'm struggling to think of anything interesting to tell you about it. Fortunately I timed my visit (unwittingly) to coincide with the one notable event that actually happens here, which is the annual Iowa State Fair, a celebration of Iowa's huge farming industry and also a must-do for any presidential candidate in an election year. This is a mid-term year, but nonetheless former VP (and undeclared candidate for 2024) Mike Pence showed up at the fair a couple of days after I did.

There was a stall selling edible crickets. Yes, as in the insects. They're full of protein, apparently, and farming them produces a carbon footprint many times lower than traditional sources of meat. I opted not to indulge. But they were advertised as a 'Gateway Bug' (gateway drug, geddit?) and that won my personal Pun Of The Fair contest, comfortably beating the 'Southpork Ranch' and a cow-based exhibit called the 'Mooseum'.

English is not my AirBnB hostess's first language and this has given me an opportunity to practice my slightly rusty Spanish. Obviously the USA has millions of people of Mexican descent and indeed birth, but I'm reluctant to open conversations in Spanish in case it comes across like I'm assuming they can't speak English. There's also the fact that Mexican accents are quite tricky to get used to. Most of the tuition I've had in England has been from Colombians, who are much easier to understand. This is why I generally root for Team Escobar when watching episodes of 'Narcos' on YouTube. 

By the way, both of the letter 'S's in the name Des Moines are silent, and it's "deh-moyn" not "day-moyn". So now you know.

Downtown Des Moines

Cattle on show at the Iowa State Fair

This is not an Edd vs Food.
Even for a human dustbin like me, the thought of actually eating a Pork Picnic was just too much.

Let's call him....Sean

Caught in a thunderstorm downtown. Hurrah for public pianos.
Especially ones on which all of the keys work and are in tune.

Signs like this are ubiquitous in the more prosperous American suburbs.
All very worthy, although 'no human being is illegal' is somewhat vacuous.
If that were true, we wouldn't lock our front doors at night. But we do.

Edd vs Food #106
Poutine at El Bait Shop, 200 SW 2nd St, Des Moines, IA.
Poutine is a Canadian dish: basically meat, potatoes, cheese, and gravy.
This one was very generous with the tater tots, but distinctly stingy with the cheese curds.

South Dakota

I had the rental car for a week and I did 1800 miles in total. Slept in the car three nights out of seven. Why not, after all? The weather is plenty warm enough and it's more secure than a tent. Saves a bit of money too. 

Here's a Google Street View of one place where I bedded down in splendid isolation. It was a cloudless night and, once the moon dipped below the horizon, the stars came out in very great numbers indeed. Somehow the sky just seems bigger here. At one point I contemplated putting my blanket on top of the car roof and sleeping in the open air; but the coyotes were howling in the distance, and some of the insects were as big as pigeons. I stayed in the car.

My time in South Dakota coincided with the 2022 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the world's largest event of its kind. Harleys thronged the highways. In this state, as in quite a few others, there's no compulsory requirement to wear crash helmets. You see people riding half-ton motorbikes at 80mph, wearing nothing but T-shirts and shorts and sandals, and maybe a bandana, while 18-wheeler trucks thunder by at close range in both directions. It boggles the mind even before you consider that these people won't get free healthcare if they crash.

I saw thousands of solo male riders, and hundreds of male riders carrying their ladyfriends on the back, and a few dozen solo female riders; but the one thing I've never seen in all my days, the Black Swan and Abominable Snowman and Loch Ness Monster of motorcycling, is a female rider carrying her manfriend on the back. Something to ponder there.

On a vaguely similar note, when I went to Mount Rushmore, it was perhaps predictable that the crowd there would be almost exclusively white. I saw only one African American and that was a lady with a white partner. I suppose you can't expect black Americans to be too enthusiastic about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both of whom, y'know, owned slaves. 

Personally I preferred the scenery in the surrounding Black Hills (irony unintended) with their lush forests. The Mount Rushmore carvings themselves are rather like the Statue of Liberty: you've known all your life what it looks like, and then when you finally get to see the thing, it looks like you expected it to look, and it's a case of 'well, there it is'. So you take a photo or two and then you leave. Box ticked. I try not to invest too much time in this kind of thing.

For me the highlight of the week was Badlands National Park, one of the most spectacular places I've ever seen, which is - if you'll excuse the immodesty - really saying something. See pictures below.

View from outside my cabin at dusk.
At the South Dakota / Wyoming border, near a town called - irony of ironies - Newcastle.

Mount Rushmore, obviously

Wind Cave National Park. This is the roof of one of the caves.
I did a 90-minute underground walking tour and banged my head several times.

Pleasant little hike in Badlands National Park.
However, one has to keep one's eyes open.
(Zoom in on the middle of the picture...)

Badlands National Park
Every layer of rock represents ten million years or so.

Badlands again

Badlands panorama

In Mount Vernon, SD (pop: 461)
The greatest AirBnB of my life to date.
My hosts were out for the night so I had this house to myself, plus this dog for company.
Forty quid!

Edd vs Food #105
Chicken & bacon ranch mac'n'cheese with spring onions and garlic toast
Shenanigans, 1903 S Ellis Road, Sioux Falls, SD

North Dakota

After Minneapolis I got back on the bus and headed up to Fargo. The only thing I knew about Fargo before arriving was the 1996 film of that name, which I hadn't even seen. I watched it on my first night in town and so "I saw Fargo in Fargo" is now a statement with which I will be annoying people for decades to come. Those of you who've seen the film may be interested to know that the woodchipper - THE WOODCHIPPER - has pride of place in Fargo's tourist information centre. See picture. 

Other than the woodchipper, there isn't really much of interest in Fargo. So I picked up a rental car and headed out into the wide open spaces, which in North Dakota are very wide and very open indeed. You can drive for hours and hours without seeing a major city or even a major intersection. Gas (as in petrol) prices have come down slightly of late: on average this week I've been paying $3.90 per US gallon, which works out at about £1.26 a litre. It's pretty good compared to back in the UK, but the American public are still up in arms about how expensive it is.

Annoyingly, after several days of uninterrupted blazing sunshine amid the strip malls and parking lots of Fargo, the weather turned overcast as soon as I got out into the countryside. Nonetheless at Theodore Roosevelt National Park I had a pleasant little hike, which was briefly interrupted by a bison parking itself on the trail ahead of me. Bison are placid creatures, and of course they're herbivores, so they represent very little danger provided that you keep your distance. Unfortunately this particular bison was steadfastly refusing to move, and it was paying me uncomfortably close attention. There was nobody else around, and no alternative path back to my car. 

So I went off the path and skirted round the top of a little cliff-edge to the east: the drop-off of the cliff wasn't steep enough to be dangerous to me, but it was just about steep enough for a charging bison to go tumbling down and not come back up, provided I could get out of the way quickly enough. That was the idea, anyway. Fortunately I didn't get charged and so my matador skills were not tested.

All this excitement will continue in the next blog, and there are no prizes for guessing which US state comes next after North Dakota.

Downtown Fargo

From the film "Fargo"...
the woodchipper.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park, seen from Sperati Point

Bison are totally mellow around cars but they get antsy around pedestrians (see blog).
So I stayed in the car for this picture.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park again.
Note the crappy weather.

Medora, ND
This is a wall in the gents toilet in the souvenir shop / grocery store.
Naturally I am unable to confirm if the ladies toilet was similarly decorated.

In Fargo - another cosy quiet suburban AirBnB

Edd vs Food #104
Big Brother Burrito from the Taco Bros truck in downtown Fargo.
Lovely bit of honesty on their menu: "All Chicken Contains Pork"

Minneapolis, Minnesota

New York is nicknamed the Big Apple, and accordingly Minneapolis is nicknamed the Mini Apple. See what they did there?

Before you all ask: no, I have not done anything Prince-related during my time in Minneapolis. The Paisley Park complex is about 20 miles out of town, it's at least $56 to get in, and I never really listened to Prince anyway.

Instead I went to...(cue groans) the football! Or 'soccer' as they call it here. Minnesota United versus Portland Timbers, and it was a bit of a ding-dong, a 4-4 draw with the first goal coming after just 13 seconds. (Quite bemused to see that the Minnesota manager was Adrian 'Inchy' Heath, fully 38 years after his appearance as an Evertonian in my first-ever Panini sticker album). There was a sell-out crowd of 20,000 or so. No away fans as far as I could tell, but in fairness, Portland is a 1,732 mile drive away. That's roughly equivalent to driving from Sunderland to Gibraltar.

Speaking of football, there have of course been some exciting developments for the ladies since my last blog, so please forgive me if I use this platform briefly to celebrate events back home. It was a close run thing but definitely the right result, and frankly it was long overdue. And I was definitely on Team Colleen all along.

Back to Minneapolis. I went to the Mall of America, which is the biggest shopping mall in the western hemisphere. It's just under three times the size of the Metrocentre in Gateshead, and it contains Nickelodeon Universe, America's biggest indoor theme park, which is six times the size Metroland used to be. Not that I bought anything or went on any of the rides. I just gawped and took pictures, and felt faintly depressed about the way our entire economy and indeed society both seem to be based entirely on the manufacture and marketing of pointlessly expensive answers to invented needs. But then who am I to lecture? I spend most of my spare cash doing this travelling malarkey, which is an invented need of my own...

It's been baking hot the whole time I've been here. My old flat cap was falling to bits so I got two replacements, a baseball cap and a sun hat, both ordered from an Amazon seller that specialises in bespoke hats for weirdly big skulls like mine. It was on the way to collecting them from an Amazon Locker that I chanced upon the intersection of Chicago Avenue and 38th St, which two years ago became briefly the world's most famous street corner, and is now officially known as George Floyd Square. It would have been crass to take tourist photos, so I didn't.

The memorial is mostly placatory and respectful, but at the same time there's graffiti saying 'No Justice No Peace'. Currently the prescribed text of progressive opinion on these matters is a book called 'How To Be An Anti-Racist' by Dr Ibram X. Kendi. I chanced upon a dog-eared copy in the living room of my Milwaukee AirBnB and read it from beginning to end over a few days, but I can't say I was convinced. It's easy to formulate all-encompassing solutions to society's problems when you've never held office, or ran for office, or ran an organisation, or indeed done anything at all in life other than go to university and then never leave it.

I really liked Milwaukee but Minneapolis hasn't grabbed me in quite the same way. The downtown area reminds me of Dallas, in that it seems to contain nothing but offices and business hotels. There's no real life there other than vagrants and junkies and suchlike. The suburbs are nice enough though, full of parks and surprisingly big lakes. In fact I felt safer in the environs of George Floyd Square than I did among the high-rises downtown, or on the light rail network that shuttles between Minneapolis and its twin city St Paul.

Big cities have their merits, but I prefer the smaller towns and the wide open spaces; that's what will feature in my next few updates. And there'll be no more football. I promise.

Downtown Minneapolis and St Anthony Falls.
Seen from the northeast end of the Stone Arch Bridge.

Nickelodeon Universe at the Mall Of America

Mall Of America

Another view of downtown, this time from 30 floors up at the Foshay Tower

Minnesota State Capitol in St Paul

Minnesota United Football Club
They have people with loudhailers whose job is to lead the crowd in singing.
Bless 'em.

Plenty of space out the back of the AirBnB.
My hosts run their own tequila distillery. Enjoy responsibly.

That last bit made me laugh all day and I don't care who knows it.

Edd vs Food #103
Falafel wrap and veggie sambusa at the Afro Deli, 5 W 7th Place, St Paul, MN.
(Sambusa is the Somali / Ethiopian version of samosa.)
I don't think this is the first ever fully veggie Edd vs Food, but there can't have been too many.