An Interesting Phenomenon

On a truly lovely day in August my drive home to central Dakota from the Cities (Mpls/St. Paul, MN) was relaxing.  It was an easy drive for once, no blizzards to contend with.

I was just puttering along at the speed limit watching the scenery and the cars passing me.  When we lived in Colorado my daughters and I often checked out the license plates of the cars passing us, so I'm kind of in the habit.

The variety is wonderful, I have to mention that.  North Dakota has only a couple of different ones, but Minnesota has quite a few, and most of them have birds or flowers or canoes, very pretty. 

Anyway, on this drive I was casually glancing at them as they went by.  At one point I realized that of the last twenty or so state plates I'd seen, only two had been either North Dakota or Minnesota. 

That area is one that I drive through on a fairly regular basis.  I habitually notice the car plates.  This was the first time I'd noticed a preponderence of out of state vehicles in an area where normally the ratio is predictably predominantly ND/MN. 

So that's the phenomenon.  There were East Coast plates, West Coast plates, Deep South plates, plates from all over the place.

I found myself wondering what on earth so many out-siders were doing in our neck of the woods, where they were heading, and what they were going to do when they got there. 

It's not hunting season, which is a time when outside plates are more common.  They could have been college students heading for NDSU or UND, except that most of the vehicles carried people in their middle or later years.  That also kind of discounts the possibility that they were headed for the oil fields in western ND. 

Whoever they were, wherever they were going, I hope they had sense enough to be looking around as they drove through.  The beautiful day was a perfect backdrop for MN trees, green pastures, and the blue of their water.  If the people were paying attention they would have noticed that the grain crops are starting to come off the fields, leaving expanses of stubble as a symbol of bread and pasta to come!  The corn is tall and the beans are just beginning to glow with maturation. 

It was indeed a lovely drive, and the variety of state license plates from all over gave me a puzzle to think about as I went along.  By the time I hit the border things were back to normal, but for a while there I had to remind myself by looking at the scenery that I wasn't back in CO doing a tourist tally with my daughters!