Across the Prairie

Weather forecasts for Minnesota and South Dakota were for heavy snowfalls at the weekend, and they were right, with the I90, the interstate freeway (where you can drive up to 75 m.p.h. - 120kph) being closed because of snow, but we've been really lucky. We left Jacki and Terry's in brilliant sunshine, and drove south and west to Minnesota, then across Minnesota on a 45 degree angle, NE to SW, missing the snow, which was further south.
To our delight, our route (pronounced ROWT in the US - we're learning!) went through Paynesville MN. Like its namesake in Victoria, where brothers Rick and Bob live, this town is beside a large lake, but this one wasn't blue, or brown, it was very, very white from shore to shore. The temperature outside, in mid-afternoon, was officially 32F (O degrees celsius), but the winds blowing across the prairie were at 60 km an hour, officially lowering the temperature by another 12 degrees Fahrenheit - and this was with the sun shining so brightly that we got really hot in the car!
We spent the night in Montevideo MN, purely because this pretty town had the same name as the capital of Uruguay, which we visited and loved when we were in South America. Some snow fell overnight, but the sun soon melted it off the car, and we continued across the prairie into South Dakota, to visit a tiny town called De Smet. For anyone who knows of the books and TV series of "Little House on the Prairie", and all the others in the series, this tiny town is a mecca, as it was the home of the author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and we felt truly welcome there.
To get to and from De Smet we used back roads, and kept well away from the highways, which allowed us to soak in the atmosphere of the prairies - undulating hills which have almost no trees, the wide grasslands covered in several feet of snow, and almost all animals being kept in huge barns.
At one stage we came across an area, about 20km long, where pheasants (originally from India but now common in the US) were looking for feed along the road edges, where little bits of grass emerged from the snow - as we came to the crest of one hill, there were about 15 on the road, which necessitated some really fancy driving to miss them all.
Our eventual stop, after 320 miles (just over 500 km) was a motel at Murdo SD, surrounded by piles of snow several metres high. Motels here are wonderful - our room had 2 queen beds, an armchair, an eating table and 2 chairs, 99 TV channels, AND a heated inside pool and sauna, for US$57 - breakfast included - and we washed and dried all our clothes for $2 more! Petrol (GAS!) costs about US$2 - US$2.10 a US gallon (4.2 litres) - about US$50 cents (or 75 cents Australian) a litreThis is a great way to travel.