This is a look at the stunning vista of downtown Fargo, North Dakota as seen from my 6th floor hotel room at the Radisson.  Interestingly the Radisson is the second tallest building in the state at 18 stories and it's visage is like a spire on the otherwise flat as a pancake plains of the eastern side of the state.  When I tell people I am from North Dakota most people think I might know something about farming or other rural endeavor but I grew up not far from the cement of downtown.  Frankly I was embarrassingly under-informed about what happens in the other 90% of the state.  This was never more clear than when farm reporter Steve Wennbloom once asked me to get me video of sugar beets sprouts (a staple crop of the area) and I returned with wheat.  It is like the difference between a car and a whale.  That was my first year in TV, I learned about rural areas quickly after that.



I was lucky enough to snap this shot of a traffic jam in Fargo.  No, actually this was Sunday morning at 9am.  I picked the regionally swanky Radisson because I wanted to be only a walk from downtown.  I had gone out on the town the prior night with two friends from high school.  I have read a lot of stories about my hometown since I left years ago.  Stories from national magazines which talks about the downtown character and an active social scene.  While it was tame by California standards I thought what I saw lived up to the billing.  Place after place near capacity buzzing with the general exuberance which accompanies the arrival of a warm weekend and the stress of work days away.

My chums Tucker and Chuck and I walked from one end of the downtown to the other.  I had requested we visit only "old school" Fargo haunts and not the newer-trendy places.  We started at Rooters, famous for a off duty Fargo cop shooting his gun into the air apparently for kicks.  Then we walked up to "The Empire" the toughest of the places downtown, it once was a dive for only the truly diligent but now gets too many walk-ins by guys like us to brag of general toughness.  After that we hit "Sports" which had not changed a bit in the years since I left, in fact I am not sure the bar had been wiped down since then.  It was exactly the experience I wanted, a walk down memory lane with my friends then a walk back to the monolith for a night of sleep before my real vacation began.  While I am from Fargo my parents moved long ago into Minnesota and that is where I was headed Sunday, if I could get out of the downtown traffic snarl.



I had one other stop to make.  My life-long friend Bill who like me had moved to California years ago needed a new "Space Aliens" shirt.  "Space Aliens" is nothing more than a burger and fry joint with enough flair to keep the kids buzzing while you slurp down the recommended chicken tortilla soup.  Bill was hoping for a grey or black shirt with the authentically cheesy  branding and I looked for exactly that, but all that was offered was tie-dyed or pink or long sleeved for made out of the material Sunday softball jerseys are made out of.  So I was turned away (after having the soup while the TV in the bar played a feverishly sweated out ping pong match from god only knows where).

"Space Aliens" is right by I-94 the major east-west highway which was about to take me to my kids and lake country and as I was soon to discover radio-and-internet free Europe.

As with every trip back home there never seems to be enough time to walk my old neighborhood or sit on the swings at Roosevelt elementary or poke my head into city hall where I was a reporter for years.  The rest of the trip was calling and deeper excursions down memory lane will have to wait for another year.

(more on my trip to Minnesota later this week)