Geezer with a Grudge: Doing the Sheyenne River Valley

Jun 18, 2009

Doing the Sheyenne River Valley

Tuesday, I’m up with the birds and out of camp at 6AM. I don’t go far, though. I stopped in Lisbon for breakfast and to watch the first hour of the day’s long rain. I gave up after doing everything I could think of, reading until I was bored, and taking an accounting course via email.

Later, I was in Valley City where the river probably isn’t as prized, since the town was swamped by the Sheyenne in April. There were still sandbags stacked against houses and businesses.
It took me a while to figure out what was going on in Valley City. I stopped at an information center/museum for a map and learned a little about the area. On advice I got at the museum, I went north to the edge of town to see the giant railroad bridge. It's pretty impressive, don't you think?

I ended up the day in, believe it or not, Napoleon, ND. This is truly Mayberry. The main drag was being dredged for new water mains, so the town wasn’t looking its best, but it’s a cool little town with a city pool, a city campground, a couple of good restaurants, and a park full of doves to sing me to sleep. $6/night for “primitive camping” which includes a shower and a couple of bucks and you’re in the pool, too.

No comments:

The Geezer Story

I stumbled upon this column name (Geezer with a Grudge) almost 20 years ago, in 1999. The first Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly editor I worked with, in late 1999, complained that the magazine was getting no mail and the editors wanted to know if any readers were still out there. I fired off a sarcastic note, as a joke, intended to provide a little humor and some feedback. He published it as an article and later called me to say he'd received more mail on that letter than he'd received in the past year! I followed that with an offer to write a monthly column attempting to piss off a particular section of the magazine's readership to see if that tactic would generate some mail.

It did, probably more regularly than the magazine wanted at times, and I wrote a monthly column for MMM until the magazine died in 2018.

I plan to post an occasional old Geezer article into the blog, followed by short comments about the current status of my perspective on our activity/sport/vehicle of choice.