Week 13: Brandon, SD (Sunday July 8, 2001)

LUCKY WEEK 13!! This week certainly did bring The Fool luck - some bad and some good. Mostly bad.

Bad Luck:

* A barber cut The Fool's hair WAY too short. Especially on top.
* The mildew in his tent (from the early rainy part of the journey) has now spread to all his other belongings, and he smells like mildew when he sweats.
* Many towns marked on the map in western MN are just one house at an intersection. This especially sucks when you are out of water.
* He shelled out 20 bucks for new sunglasses, and lost them 2 hours later.
* Lots of dogs have been chasing him, because no one ties up their dogs in western MN.

Good Luck:

* A nice family let him sleep in their yard one night, in Manley, MN.
* The overeager barber recommended a steakhouse, and the WF ended up having a pretty good steak there the next night.
* Burger King Chicken Tenders are still only 99 cents.

The WF left Fairmont Monday, and the first town he encountered was Welcome, which welcomed him with a rainstorm. He ran into a bunch of DETOUR signs the next day, but he ignored them. This is one nice thing about being a Walking Fool - you don't have to take detours, unless a bridge is out - you just walk past the road construction.

Spafford is one of those "one house" towns discussed above. The Fool may start a campaign to have towns like this removed from the map. He feels they are a trick - especially when their dot on the map is the same size as other small towns that have stores and whatnot. Some days he has to go 20 or 30 miles between towns, and although he carries a certain amount of food and water, it's pretty frustrating to expect a town, and get a house.

Tuesday night, he found some woods to camp in, amazingly enough. Woods are pretty scarce out there. It's mostly corn fields, and since the corn is only knee-high right now, he couldn't even camp hidden in the corn if he wanted to. So finding a spot to camp is actually a real pain in the neck. He tries not to trespass overtly when he camps, especially in fields or yards or whatever, and he likes to be pretty much out of sight, so as not to attract undue attention. He even has anxiety dreams about where to camp. Tuesday night brought The Fool a dream where he was camping out, and then all these people - a family of some sort - kept running by his tent, and he realized that he had accidentally camped in someone's yard, and he was going to get in "big trouble".

Wednesday The Fool crashed in a motel in Worthington, and drowned his sorrows in Burger King Chicken Tenders. He also had breakfast and lunch there the following day, and just hung out there poring over his maps all the next morning, not really feeling like walking. (This is not surprising, since the temperature out there has been in the 90s, with around 80% humidity. And there is nothing to see. And there are lots of mean dogs.) Another delaying tactic was to get a haircut. (see bad luck section above)

Thursday The Fool hit Adrian, where he had the steak recommended by the barber. He also passed through Rushmore and Magnolia that day - both names of fine independent films! (Well, you might fine some disagreement about Magnolia, but whatever...) Friday through Sunday he hovered near the border between SD and MN, in a town called Luverne. He hit the library to check e-mail, and relaxed a little bit. It was actually Monday morning when hit finally crossed over into South Dakota - his eigth state! There wasn't much fanfare, and there wasn't even a sign noting the border - The WF thinks it might have fallen down, or something. (There were a couple of suspicious concrete stumps along the road at one point.)