Oh, Glendive.
We blasted right through North Dakota with speedlimits north of 80 MPH, but managed to notice some fascinating buildings along the side of the road of these towns that were decimated by the interstate. We didn’t get great pictures of them ourselves, but were curious enough to research it a bit and found this great site: www.ghostsofnorthdakota.com
These images show pretty much exactly what it’s like to drive this stretch of road. It’s so flat that you can see a whole train from engine to caboose.
Pretty much the most exciting thing that happened in Glendive was Maddie’s first hotel experience (since we’d been in AirBnBs or homes the whole time so far) where she waltzed out of her cage as we were loading out and made it nearly all the way to the front desk before a quick-thinking maid blocked the hallway with her cleaning cart. Maddie seemed to quite like the Holiday Inn Express experience. Note Zeke in the background rolling his eyes as if he were telling Maddie “I stay in hotels ALL the time. This one is just okay. And you know they’re going to leave us in here while they go eat pancakes.”
Had one of the worst meals of our lives. Casey’s salad was two pieces of iceberg lettuce and a small carrot on a teacup saucer. We even considered going and gambling at the so-called casino a bit, but that turned out to just be a room full of digital slot machines and some sad people spending their last $20.
After dinner, we took a dip in the hotel pool to find this crazy old bag hogging the whole pool with her jazzercise moves. We tried to make polite small talk while dodging her sagging elbows. It went a little like this:
Fascist in the Pool: “Where are you from?”
Trent: “Tennessee, but we’re moving to California.”
Fascist in the Pool: “Oh, we’re trying to move out of California. You know, all the Mexicans.”
Trent: “We like Mexican people.”
Fascist in the Pool: “You just wait until you get out there. Nine generations all on welfare.”
Trent: “First of all, California was Mexico about 4 or 5 generations ago…”
Fascist in the Pool: “I just wish the San Andreas Fault would get rid of LA and San Francisco so we’d get our state back.”
Trent: “Wait, you want millions of people to die?”
Fascist in the Pool: (just smiles smugly)
Casey: “Maybe we should talk about something else.”
Trent: “How do you like Trump so far?”
Fascist in the Pool: (gives two big thumbs up) “He’s doing a great job. If everyone would just get out of his way so he could build the wall.”
At this point the conversation pretty much disintegrated into a shouting match ending with me dragging Casey out of the pool before she and the old bitch got into fisticuffs. We felt slightly humiliated when we got back to the room and realized we’d been shouting at an old lady, but come on.
Our last-ditch idea for truly discovering Glendive was the Dinosaur Museum we had seen on the way in. Casey’s Mom’s mentee, Oliver (who is practically a member of the family) is obsessed with rocks and fossils and stuff like that, so we thought we might be able to pick up a souvenir for him there. The outside of the building wasn’t exactly inspiring, but we got a little more concerned when Casey Googled “Glendive Dinosaur Museum” to check the hours and found the official website’s URL is http://www.creation-truth.org. Oh. It’s THAT kind of dinosaur museum. Like straight up T-rex and Moses running around together. On second thought, we left town bright and early. If they cleaned Glendive up, it’d still be a shithole.
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