I had delayed my return until I was pretty sure spring was in full bloom on the high plains. Two days after I got back, it snowed 24 inches in 24 hours. The thing about snow on the high plains is the wind blows. This means that there is no snow in some places and 10-foot drifts in others. My door was drifted shut and I had to call my neighbor to dig me out enough to dig my truck out. So much for spring.

After a few weeks, between various conditions like slow work, not making any money, deteriorating camp conditions and full blown mud season approaching, I decided I needed a serious break from the Bakken. I called Lottie and asked her if she would like me to come home. The answer was yes, yes, yes. She took a flight a couple days later and got in Williston for the first of the spring rains, which half the time are freezing. We sold my shack, packed my truck and started on an epic 2,500-mile road trip to Georgia.

I’d driven that trip before and learned a few things. One is: If I never have to go to Chicago again, it’ll be too soon, so the southern route was in order. This worked out well, because Lottie had never seen Deadwood, S.D., and wanted to, so off we went. We spent a very nice evening in Deadwood, and then started across the breadbasket of America.

Besides agriculture, the Great Plains seems to be a huge real estate storage area. The towns are few, small and far between. One thing they all seemed to have in common was great community spirit. In each town, there was a museum or attraction meant to pull travelers off the freeway to spend money. We saw an antique tractor museum, an antique steam tractor  museum, Wall Drugs, a keel-boat museum and the world’s largest ball of mud. Something for everybody.

We weren’t in any particular hurry, so it was no problem to pull off and take in the sights or get a good meal at one of those small town diners where the menu is on a chalkboard and the waitress calls you “honey.” Nevermind the big cities and the chain restaurants.

A note about traveling the interstate highway system: West of the Mississippi, the roads were great, smooth, construction free and in good shape. East of the Mississippi, not so much. Apparently, somebody’s brother-in-law was in the barrel renting business, ‘cause they’d put up miles of them on pretty good roads with no construction in sight, and then when the smooth part of the freeway went away, and they desperately needed repair, they’d end the barrels and turn everybody loose. Eventually, if you travel the freeway, you have to pass through a big city. This generally happened to us in the late afternoon just in time for rush hour. It being spring, there was usually a late afternoon thundershower just to make life more interesting. All that traffic scared Lottie pretty badly and it turned out that when I was driving and Lottie was riding, she mostly thought of her bladder. When she was driving, and I was riding, I mostly thought of the afterlife.

The afternoon of the fourth day we pulled into our own yard, and I started the process of rejoining the 21st century. After two years of the Bakken, I was ready for a shower with actual HOT water (nevermind the baby wipes and Old Spice ...),  a flush toilet (I flushed it four times, just to make sure), a decent stove that didn’t explode cans against the wall, and a lot of other things we take for granted. I don’t know where the next wild place I go will be, but I’m gonna recharge my batteries a while first.