I flew to North Dakota last week to deliver a training there and am just now getting around to posting about it.

The most amazing thing to me about North Dakota is the absolute emptiness of that state.  As I flew over, I could see only the small hills and twisting veins of rivers all the way to the horizon, and everywhere brown, brown, brown.  Occasionally, a small town would appear at the bend of a river, but by small I mean the equivalent of a few blocks in a typical city.  Nothing in the geography suggested what prompted this small gathering, and the complete isolation was a challenge to its continued existence.  Even the capital, Bismarck, where we conducted the training, is no larger than Old Town Alexandria, and the entire state contains only about 650,000 people.¹

The training itself was full of small hassles.  My flight out of Denver (the connection between D.C. and Bismarck) was delayed repeatedly, nearly canceled, and eventually took off under a weather warning in which we were told we might end up landing in Fargo … a profoundly unhelpful option.  Neither Denver nor Bismarck was experiencing bad weather, but Minneapolis, situated between them, got heavy snow for nine straight hours.  While waiting around at the Denver airport,² I did meet, randomly and fortunately, a few state and federal Child Welfare staff who were attending the training.  They invited me into their travel group, so at least I had a few others to complain with and track the changes.

My situation was better than some of the other trainers, though, who were connecting through Minneapolis.  One of them couldn’t get a flight until the next day and two others checked into the hotel around one in the morning.

On top of the flight problems, the hotel added to the troubles by overbooking a group of 75 plus teenagers for a high-school FBLA conference.  They had to send a number of training participants, including me, at a hotel a few blocks away.

Once the hassles of travel and setup were over, though, the training sessions went well enough.  There was no real “night life” in Bismarck, so  on the evening between the two training sessions, a few of us ate dinner at the hotel, had a few drinks, then drifted to our rooms.  The trip back was uneventful, but I didn’t make it home until around 1:30 in the morning.

All-in-all, not a bad training, but also not a very fun trip.

Footnotes:

1. For comparison, D.C. has nearly 600,000, and Manhattan has over 1.5 million.
2. On the up side, the Denver airport has a Paradise Bakery and Cafe, which I’d never heard about before, but which is excellent.