The Fargo trip, blow-by-blow...

SATURDAY:

We'll start this report after Dave and Vicki's elegant wedding and reception, because I'm trying to keep this blog focused on the Fargo thing.

We splashed through a helluva rainstorm in the Quad Cities -- we were glad to have rented an SUV, even if it is a toy SUV (a Ford Escape). We were getting out of the truck at a noted local ice-cream place, Whitey's, when the sky, not satisfied with the heavy rain that was coming down, decided instead to drop all its water at once. Very impressive.

Well, here's one thing from before the wedding. We were driving around that morning, and searching online, and found The Machine Shed, a restaurant "dedicated to the American farmer." (Originally, it was dedicated "to the Iowa farmer," but then they opened locations in other states.) The food was delicious, and the portions enormous. The $2.50 cinnamon bun that we all split and eventually ate less than half of (above) may have violated Miss Piggy's rule: "Never eat anything larger than your head." We absolutely cannot eat like this when we move out here.

Oddly, though the restaurant staff was all dressed like farmers, and the building was plastered with farming gear, there didn't appear to be any actual farmers eating there. It almost seemed as if the restaurant were dedicated to the memory of the American farmer.

SUNDAY DRIVE:

The drive from the Quad Cities went well. It was 10 hours as advertised. We missed the SPAM museum, but Jen visited her first White Castle. "You're doing it wrong!" our pal Sue messaged us. "Because it isn't really a White Castle experience unless you are drunk."

As we got closer to Fargo, we saw a herd of buffalo on the side of the interstate, and a painted wooden sign: "Buffalo for sale" with a toll-free number.

We passed through Minneapolis on the way, and we'll return this way for our flight out on Tuesday morning. Minneapolis is the closest large airport to Fargo, but it would be a long drive to Fargo from Minneapolis after a flight. It turns out that if you're not buying tickets to the Fargo airport at the last second, it can be pretty reasonable -- with a little advance notice, it's about $350 roundtrip from Atlanta.

SUNDAY NIGHT:

We lived out W.C. Fields' joke about Philadelphia: We went to Fargo, but it was closed. Apparently, the downtown area simply isn't open on Sunday nights, including the restaurant and the lounge at our hotel. We managed to find Juano's, a Mexican-American restaurant that, in a previous life, was the coffee shop where Peggy Lee first sang.

We also stopped by the Fargo Theatre, an endangered movie theater, built in 1926, that rules Fargo's Broadway. They were showing "Thumbsucker," which was rated R, and "March of the Penguins," which, sadly, Katie had already seen. So we didn't actually grab a show at the Fargo, but we were able to look around and check out the very cool lobby. The outside signs and marquee dominate the block, and are quite striking at night. The theater is now owned by a nonprofit, and its preservation seems to be a high priority of many in town. By spelling out the city's name so boldly, it serves as a visual icon for Fargo.

The Hotel Donaldson is indeed fabulous. It's an interesting object that wouldn't exist in nature -- it was wrought with Microsoft money. Microsoft bought out Great Plains Software, one of Fargo's largest employers, for a whopping $1.1 billion in 2001, and the wife (now ex-wife) of the company's founder took a chunk of that sum and renovated the building top-to-bottom shortly afterward. There's not a surface of the hotel that's not beautiful.

Breakfast is included each morning, and they set out a nice spread of beer, wine, bread and cheese every afternoon. The hotel's turndown service includes a plate of very rich truffles artfully arranged on a plate.

A very good bottle of red wine was waiting for us in the room, though that can be attributed to Jen's always-thoughtful Mom and Ken, not the hotel.

One of the very cool things the hotel has is an outdoor hot tub on the roof, which the three of us used well Sunday night. We failed to ask if the tub is open all winter.

We're told that Fargo can do much, much better in November on the weather front. It was in the 50s during the day -- warm enough to walk around without a jacket, though I clung to the Green Bay Packers coat I'd brought, worried that the season might turn without notice.

MONDAY:

First thing, we met up with Carrie Michaelson, a local realtor whose online ad for a house Jen fell in love with. Jen wrote to her, and it turns out that the ad is for her own gorgeous and very reasonably priced house. Jen has spent a significant amount of time plotting how we might be able to purchase Carrie's house instead of renting, though that doesn't appear to be in the cards.

Carrie used to live in Woodbridge, Va., and was very excited to meet up with folks from the D.C. area, even though she doesn't handle rentals. She very kindly devoted her morning to taking us through every part of the Fargo-Moorhead area.

Here's how the F-M metro area is put together: From west to east, you have the cities of West Fargo and Fargo, North Dakota, then the Red River, which serves as the state line, then Moorhead, Minnesota. It's all pretty much a contiguous whole. The City of Fargo is older in the north and newer in the south. The north has tidy, solid-looking houses on straight, tree-lined streets. The south end seems to stretch forever, with the housing getting newer the further south one goes.

The older neighborhoods are nicely intact -- Fargo doesn't seem to be suffering from any influx of McMansions in its older neighborhoods, probably because there's still cheap land to be found close by.

At 12:30, we said goodbye to Carrie and headed over to the federal courthouse to see the folks who work in the judge's chambers. We met the judge's longtime secretary, her husband, and the judge's current clerk.* The six of us ate lunch at a spiffy downtown diner, and talked about the summer mosquitoes and the winter wind.

[* I've decided for the moment not to get really specific on this blog with the names of the people I'll be working with. No sense in risking getting fired -- or drawing a contempt of court citation, for that matter -- before I even get there. Plenty of time for that later.]

One thing that charmed me about the downtown is that it's definitely the first time I've seen a hemp shop across the street from a federal courthouse:

We decided to use the afternoon to retrace some of our steps from the morning, and try to find a few thank-yous for my folks, my sister Meg, and our pal Sue Hoye, who kept Joey and Ellie at various times throughout the long weekend.

We looked through the downtown variety store, Zandbroz Variety, which reminded us of classic D.C. stores Wake Up Little Susie and Chocolate Moose. Zandbroz has book and music sections, jewelry, cards, novelties, home furnishings -- a little of everything, in an exceptionally smart package. This store would not be out of place in Georgetown. However, they didn't have a lot of things in the store that said "Fargo," and that's what we were looking for.

We found a few cute things in a store about a half-block off Broadway, a storefront set up by a local woman who travels to China a few times a year, buys a bunch of stuff, and heads back. Her husband tired of people wandering by the house at all hours and made her get the retail space. The day we visited, the shop was being run by a friend of hers who comes in every once in a while to give her pal a break.

The woman running the store gave us two pieces of advice: Live in the north part of Fargo -- it's nicer, quieter, has good, small schools, and has better parks; and ditch the Packers jacket for a Minnesota Vikings jacket.

Still, we found little Fargo gear. So we decided to look at the mall in the southern part of town just to see what was there. It looks pretty much like any other mall, which was a little disappointing on this trip, but might prove comforting in the middle of a long winter there. There's a standalone Krispy Kreme store nearby -- very cool. We didn't find anything at the mall, either, and headed to a nearby grocery store, Hornbacher's. This was the high point of the trip for me -- what a beautiful store! Much nicer than any Giant or Safeway in the D.C. area.

We ended up back downtown to eat dinner and see if the Fargo Theatre had any groovy souvenirs. Jackpot!

We ate dinner in the "HoDo Restaurant." We started with walleye cakes, their locally caught version of crabcakes. I had a bison steak, which was quite tasty, and Jen and Katie split a salmon dish. It struck us that this was better eating than is possible within Rockville's city limits.

Jen and I set Katie up with the TV, then came back downstairs to catch some live music in the "HoDo Lounge." Jen had a Guinness on tap, and I had a regional Octoberfest brew. Delicious.


TUESDAY:

We zipped out of the hotel at 7 a.m., and made it to the Minneapolis airport with a few minutes to spare. The voyage home was uneventful.

Among other things, I learned on this trip that Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper were on their way to a show in Fargo when their plane crashed, though it should be noted that their plane crashed on takeoff, not landing -- Fargo did not kill Buddy Holly.

Something that struck me during the trip was this: Everything out here has been wrested from the land -- where in say, Miami, you can just stick an umbrella in the sand and serve drinks and everyone has a good time, here you have to make a concerted effort to create things and make them usable.