As Dorothy so eloquently stated…there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.

Roses at International Peace Garden

I’m back from my recent trip to North Dakota, and I have discovered that there is truly no place like home.

Don’t get me wrong; there are good things and bad things about every place where you may travel.  Let me briefly touch on the not so great things and then I will take a peek at the good things.

Who likes air travel?  I’m not a large person but the seats on airplanes just get more and more cramped and if you think I’m making that up, think again.  I know for a fact that many airlines will move up seats (yes they are movable) a few inches in each row.  What do they gain, two extra rows!  Your knees press into the back of the seat in front of you.  The good thing is that if you are a short person you feel quite a bit taller so it is a fantastic ego boost.

Does anyone really enjoy Hotel beds?  I have stayed in 4 and 5 star hotels and I have stayed in mediocre ones, and I find there is one thing that they all have in common.  They all have crappy beds.  I always bring my own pillow as well.  It all takes some getting used to, but usually by the time I am down with the bed and getting good sleep it’s time to leave.  In addition it is an unfamiliar room and I have a tendency to get up once during the night.  During this trip I exited the bathroom and turned a bit too quickly aiming for the bed and walked smack dab into the wall.  You would think that humans learn from experience, but the next night I did the same exact thing.  So this trip I walked around with a headache and a knot on my noggin.  The benefit of repeatedly knocking oneself in the head (although my husband just couldn’t understand how I could keep doing it) is that when I lay me down to sleep, I slept.

Staying entertained in an unfamiliar state can be a daunting task.  North Dakota is a pretty large state by comparison to say…Delaware.  It is however more sparsely populated.  Nothing wrong with that, but with more population comes things to do, restaurants, and stores.  We discovered that anywhere you go in North Dakota it’s going to be about 100 mile trip.  That’s jus the way it is and the locals just take this fact for granted. Growing up 40 miles from Washington D.C. you can imagine that this was quite the culture shock for me.  As for restaurants, well when we asked a local about a good place to eat he told us, um…Applebee’s.  And since we have several Applebee’s within 10 miles of our house, we stopped and smelled the roses (yes there were still some blooming in the Peace Garden) and made ourselves right at home.