“Pic of the Week”, May 25, 2018: The Flood Memorial, Grand Forks

01 Red River and Flood Memorial (10)

I’ve previously discussed how flat the great plains of central North America are.  Like the Amazon basin in South America, when there is flooding of a river over its bank the flat topography lets the water spread a far distance before there is enough contour change to stop it.  Obviously this can do a lot of damaged in populated areas.

The Red River, which flows through Minnesota and North Dakota on its way into Manitoba and on towards Lake Winnipeg, is one of the dominant rivers of the plains.  It seems like the Red floods every few years and usually a small flood can be reasonably managed.  But there are rare springs when the elements combine to make flooding particularly severe, …

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.All Trips / Central USA / North America / North Dakota

Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota

Grand Forks Air Force Base B25J Flo

I’ve visited only two US Air Force Bases in my life.  One was in Colorado Springs where our friends (2 Air Force veterans) gave us a tour of the training facility and some of the planes on exhibition, a very memorable visit.  My second was this Air Force Base (AFB) in North Dakota, where one can visit a diverse display of aircraft and missiles outside the main entrance gate.  Apparently free guided tours of these aircraft can be arranged for groups of 6 and more with 2 weeks notice, but as just my father and I were visiting and ours was a spur-of-the-moment decision, this didn’t apply to us.  We did not actually enter the AFB, just explored the planes …

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.All Trips / Central USA / North America / North Dakota

Sertoma Park, Grand Forks

08 Grand Forks Sertoma Park (29)

The city of Grand Forks, situated in northeastern North Dakota, is not exactly located on  main tourist paths.  In fact, it’s what most folks would call “flyover” country.  And that wouldn’t bother the friendly people of Grand Forks one little bit.  They know they live in a clean and beautiful city, of which they are rightly proud.

Most of my memories of Grand Forks are from when I was a boy, traveling to it from our home in Winnipeg for shopping weekends.  It had been several decades since I’d last spent any time here and what I found when we recently visited Grand Forks was a pretty city that was extremely family friendly and liveable.

We stopped at Sertoma Park, one of …

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