Ray says we are like the old game “Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego” with little dots tracking us across the US. After a nice run 10 laps around the campground, we are ready to travel across Minnesota. Green fields, the St. Croix and then the Mississippi River, quite narrow as it flows through St. Paul. It is a gorgeous day, too nice to be in a car but we have states to cross before the rains and cold weather hit Montana.
At a rest stop, we learn that 400,000 square miles of North America used to be prairie. Today, the most fertile and well-watered region, the tallgrass prairie, has been reduced to less than 4% of its original area. This makes it one of the rarest and most endangered ecosystems in the world. This sea of grass stretched from the Rocky Mountains to east of the Mississippi River, from Saskatchewan, south into Texas. It was the continent’s largest continuous ecosystem supporting an enormous quantity of plants and animals. Prairie began appearing in the mid-continent from 8,000 to 10,000 years ago and has developed into one of the most complicated ecosystems in the world, surpassed only by the rain forests of Brazil.
Driving through this area and into South Dakota, there are miles and miles of corn fields. We cannot believe how much corn is being grown. Did you know the US has over 96 million acres of corn, producing over 13 billion bushels and is subsidized at around $3B a year? We see what appears to be soybean fields turning a colorful yellow.
Wind turbines dot the landscape near Sioux Falls and then we see these… not sure what they are.
Tonight we are again at a KOA in Sioux Falls – so many huge rvs pulling in, it feels like a bus depot. Quite an rv culture we had no idea existed! I think visitors from China or Africa would be incredulous.