It feels good to get on the road again . For quite a few
months I’ve mostly been around Denver leading a pretty standard routine and
actually doing some consulting work. Yes, I do sometimes do some work. I
realized the only recent pictures I have of Denver in the weeks before my
departure are a few of this snake I came across on the Cherry Creek Trail a few
miles from my apartment when I was on a bike ride. I don’t know what species it
was, definitely not a rattler, but it was impressively long and didn’t seem to
upset by the attention I paid to it.

I decided on a northerly route to New Jersey so headed
northeast across the Nebraska Sand Hills and camped the first night in a state
park in northeastern South Dakota. The next day I drove through central
Minnesota, stopped for lunch in Saint Cloud, and got to my Motel 6 room in the
northwestern Brooklyn Park suburb in mid-afternoon. Two observations I have of
Minnesota, the Midwestern state I’ve probably spent the least amount of time in,
are first that everything in the small towns across the state looks especially
clean and well kept, and second that outside of the Twin Cities metro area
people do really talk like the people in the movie Fargo.