North Dakota observations

This is really from a few days ago, but I had some thoughts I wanted to post.

In North Dakota we drove from Fargo to Bismark. We had plenty of time to take in the scenery, at least what we could see from the road.  There are quite a few dirt roads.  In fact, it seemed that at most exits, although the main road that intersected with the expressway was paved, most roads off of that one were dirt.  This helped to explain why sometimes I'd see a vehicle covered with dust.

The landscape was mostly rolling fields, with very few trees.  But things were green. I assume that it's still late spring and that in July and August maybe things would be dried up.  Occasionally we'd see lines of trees.  We assume they were planted as windbreaks.

There seems to be a tradition among ND ranchers of displaying an old piece of farm equipment at the edge of a field.  We saw this on quite a few ranches.  Not on every field, and not multiple pieces, but just one old buggy or bailer or something.  We didn't notice this in South Dakota.

Also, the ranchers like to have an entrance way of some sort to their ranch.  Sometimes this was just simple posts but sometimes they would be ornamented with metal figures or antlers or whatnot.

For the record, here's the capitol building in Bismark, state capital of ND.  Quite different from Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota.