These are the badlands of North Dakota, pretty awesome and also beautiful, but the shapes could be strange, provocative, eerie. From there I was driving on the interstate - not a happy thing for me. It was snowing, slushy for the most part, but still not great and the traffic was whizzing past me kicking up more stuff to throw at my windshield. It was tough driving and then I saw that there is a Beulah, North Dakota. I called Graham to see if I really needed to go there and he himmed and hawed about it, but, yes. So I did. The good thing is that it got me off the interstate and on to a more reasonable road. I got to Beulah just before dark but in time to catch the local hardware store still open. I was looking for a Beulah sticker, they of course had none. I did get some WD40 to not walk out empty handed. The man was nice, helpful, it was a really nice hardware store and had everything! He also told me that it was going to snow in the night. I found an abandoned - hard to say what it was - RV park in town and decided I would spend the night there. In the meantime the guy at the hardware store told me the local diner had Monday night German buffet night. Well...I didn't recognize most of the things but they did have excellent cabbage rolls. My dinner, including tea, with the senior discount came to $11.25. I then decided to watch Monday night football at a bar. That was interesting. A lot of men in this bar - probably 50 - 100, there was one open chair at the bar so I took that one. It turns out most of these men work in a cold mine near Beulah - Beulah is a big mining town and they also have a coal fired power plant. They also have a coal liquification plant where they turn coal into natural gas. Tom, the guy I was talking to was 27 and from Minnesota. He told me that most of the guys are from elsewhere, they make good money, they work 9 months out of the year because the mines are closed in winter. These are open pit mines with huge - huge earth moving equipment. I learned all kinds of things about Tom and from him. It was nice and on top of all that Minnesota won which makes people in North Dakota happy. I toured the liquification plant the next day. Interesting!

I'll show you my camping accommodations in the next pictures.