We are spending three nights at the Corps of Engineers campground at Lake Sakakwea, 80-ish miles south of Minot, ND. It is an absolutely gorgeous campground with huge sites, asphalt and concrete sites, lots of grass and trees.
We arrived on Thursday, and went spent time Friday and Saturday seeing historic sites nearby. We started at the North Dakota Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center outside of Washburn, ND. Very, very nice historical presentation and some replicas of outstanding art, both modern and 1800s.
Once we got ourselves oriented, we went to Fort Mandan, a recreation of the fort the expedition stayed in during the winter of 1804\1805. There was a charge for the interpretive tour, but the guide was really, really good.
The fort had had a lot of furnishings to show how they lived.
We then went to the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site a few miles away. This is the same group of Indians whose dirt/log buildings we saw recreated at Fort Abraham Lincoln a few days before. This recreated building had a number of furnishings in it and was slightly larger.
It was a foggy, dreary morning. We noticed how many boats were fishing the outlet of the spillway, and we drove down it a little to see.
Today we went back to Washburn for a late breakfast and tried to see the local county museum. Silly us didn’t check the times though, and it wasn’t open. Then we decided to go to the “ big town” of Garrison to get some groceries before heading to the FMCA rally in Minot. We had a fascinating detour through the Audubon National Wildlife Refuge. The building itself was officially closed, but the cleaner let us in. I didn’t want to spend too much time inside, but we did do the Auto Tour. It was gorgeous, and I saw this huge hawk. I am not sure what kind it is, but it was so big I thought it might be a a juvenile eagle. This is a picture I took at as big of a zoom as I possibly could manage.
We had pork chops in the sous vide along with potatoes mixed with onions and mushrooms. Lovely. Tomorrow we head to the rally pretty early so we don’t get caught into the line here for the dump station. They only have 2 dumps for the 90 or so campsites here!