Fargo Living...

Well, since we have been living here for more than 2 weeks now, we thought we should write a blog updating everyone on what we have been doing to keep ourselves busy!

Besides having the layout of the Fargo Target store completely memorized, we have also been exploring other areas of the town too! Jenni already has her favourite street, complete with fancy dream home, all picked out, and we try to make a point of venturing down that street on our way home! It is 8th Street South, and it is the most picturesque street we have seen! It has huge trees lining both sides of the street, punctuated by old-town style lamposts. We are excited for the snow to come so we can snap a shot of the street with wintery trees and snow :) Here is our summer picture of this street: (More pictures to come, including one of Jenni's dream house! )

Being the picnic fanatics that we are, how could we resist a splendid afternoon at one of the lovely parks Fargo has to offer. With no Romas Deli, or Little Lucas to satisfy our sandwich needs, we turned to hard labour and made our own delicious sandwiches. We packed up some Gatorade, and some salt and vinegar chips (yum), along with our Backgammon board, and headed to Island Park. We found a nice spot near a statue of some dude, under the shade of an old tree and set up our picnic. We sat and enjoyed our lunch, played some backgammon, which of course Brad won, and had a nice photoshoot. All the while, being enjoyed as a picnic ourselves by the local clan of mosquitoes who apparently also thought it was a splendid day for a picnic. Here are some pictures of our food chain picnic adventure:

The glorious trees in Island Park

Brad models the Gatorade

Brad and the statue of some dude

We also took some time to explore downtown Fargo. It is very quaint and pretty much the way we imagined small midwest cities to look. There are cool old brick buildings, and most of the stores are small, independent places, with a few corporate chains (lots of Subway restaurants around) in between. We walked down Broadway, and took some cool shots of the downtown locale and wandered around the outskirts of downtown checking out some cool old churches! We noticed a stray bison (you can tell it's a bison because of the humped back, yes we looked it up :P) wandering the area too, he had some interesting tattoos, so we of course photographed this. :) We also walked past the train station, which from the outside looks like the perfect mid-west train station, but the inside is well...a bike shop...so we meandered through the shop admiring the bikes, then continued on our way.

Tattooed Bison

Fargo Theatre

Crosswalk shot looking down Broadway

Train station come bike shop!

During the cool spell we had last week, we went out to the Red River Valley Fair. Turns out, during the week between 11 and 1 admission is free! Needless to say, we showed up at 12:50 and got our free admission, and got there in time to catch the 1pm Dueling Pirates show! Turns out, the pirates were more diving than dueling, but it was still a pretty impressive show all the same! One of them was a world champion high diver, and showed us his skills by plumetting from a 70ft high diving board down into a tank only 10ft deep! OOOOOOHHHHH AHHHHHHH! :) After watching the duel...er....diving pirates, we made our way to Jenni's favourite place...the petting zoo! In the zoo they had many awesome animals, including, yes you guessed it LLAMAS!!! Woooo!! We waited for an army of Y-campers to pass by so we could have some llama action! :) This llama was awesome, he reached his neck out super far to steal food from a little kids hand...maybe this llama was part giraffe? Who knows? Either way, Jenni LOVED him! After llama excitement was over, we headed to the agricultural education center, where we milked a cow. Sadly, it was a plastic cow, but we still got stickers that proclaimed our ability to milk fake cows :) We also got to see a little chick hatch!! We walked over to this little wooden box filled with eggs, and saw one starting to hatch, so we stayed and witnessed the hatching adventure of the chick who the little girl standing next to us called "Beth". After the milking of the fake cow, and the hatching of Beth the chick we needed some sustenance, so headed over to the food court....using the loosest definition of "food court" here :P We decided on hot dogs and orange soda and sat and enjoyed our lunch surrounded by booths for foot long corn dogs and deep fried buckets o' cheese.

Triple-tandem dive from the pirates!

Alpacas

Miniature Highland Cow

Best animal ever!

REEEAAACHHHH!!!

<3

Look at that face!!!!

Ducklings!

Hairiest bird ever!

Sounds delicious!

Brad takes his turn...apparently he was a natural!

Almost there!!!

Happy Birthday, Beth!

:D

After our delightful trip to the fair, the weather made a turn for the HOT! We went out and bought some ice cream, buying what we thought to be good ol' Dreyers brand, only to realize something quite fantastical. Apparently, out here, our friend Dreyer has a pseudonym...EDY! So of course we took pictures of the momentous discovery!!!

Edy?! Who is EDY!?

Another cooling strategy we used during the hot spell (our genius money saving plan)...we sat in the Barnes and Noble cafe for 4 hours, mooching off of their A/C so we don't have to use ours! We both took our laptops, Brad worked on some research for his big paper due at the end of the semester, and Jenni worked on the blog :) After our laptop batteries cut out on us, we busted out the cribbage board! OOHHH YEAH! That's just how we roll you see, when you don't have anything to do, play board games! :) Of course we got a snapshot of our cooling station set-up...

Decisions, decisions....which cards to put in the crib!?

After our rousing cribbage match (which of course Brad won), and starbucks treats, we kept up the awesome A/C mooching plan and headed to Target to wonder around a bit. We know it so well now, we could be tourguides!! After another exciting Target adventure, we went to Brad's favourite shop in all the land....Menards! They have an awesome low-budget commercial, complete with jingle, which they play on a loop in the store itself...it's quite an experience and definitely a place you will be taken should you choose to visit us :)

Brad is such a fan of the store, and the jingle that he bought himself one awesome Menards shirt, and even modeled it too! :)

So this is where our story ends for now....be back soon with more updates of our adventures!