Fargo,
North Dakota USA
The largest city in North Dakota boasting a small city atmosphere with a big city vibe. Their words, not mine.
In 1996, Fargo was hurled into fame by the Cohen Brothers and their infamous, Oscar winning dark comedy, Fargo.
So apart from a famous film, a boat and a bank, what’s Fargo got to offer?
Broadway Baby! Well Broadway Fargo, that is. The main drag is where the centrepiece of Fargo lives, the art deco Fargo Theatre.
Oh, wait - it’s a movie theatre?? So, no Broadway or even off-Broadway, or even off-off-off Broadway shows?
Sigh. Well what should we do in Fargo? Visit a museum, I hear you say? Great idea - there’s plenty of museums to choose from in Fargo.
The arty-farty types can go to the Plains Art Museum and view a bit of Wharhol.
Or you can visit the Fargo Air Museum and see a happy plane called Duggy. (My attention is waning, Fargo…)
If it interests you (and believe me, it really doesn’t) there is a sport museum. The Roger Maris Museum is dedicated to modern day baseball. Yawn.
Although as this picture clearly shows, baseball players in Fargo wear crowns. And well, if baseball was played in full coronation gear plus crowns, I might watch that. There’s not a lot going on in Fargo.
Still on our museum trail, if we’re getting very desperate, we could go and see the line of different coloured tractors at the Dahl Car Museum, but it feels like we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel here…
And so on to the Children’s Museum. I’m hoping to find children preserved in glass cases but instead I find faceless children and the promise of a miniature train.
There was no sign of a miniature railway and things at the children’s museum were starting to look bleak until…
…we got to pull Seamores intestines out! Good save, Fargo!
It feels like we’ve probably used up a good 90 minutes in Fargo so far (if we didn’t see a movie) but if we came all this way, we’d rather like to see more (thank you Seamore)…
I guess we should be visiting the Fargo-Moorhead Visitor Centre. This is where we can see the famous woodchipper prop from the movie Fargo and the colourful bison.
Here they are. Honestly Fargo, that’s not as impressive as I’d hoped.
As you may have picked up, I’m struggling to find reasons to visit Fargo, where the unofficial motto seems to be “it could be worse”. Especially after spending such a wonderful day in Espoo yesterday and I’ve been desperately digging for something, anything to make me excited, or vaguely interested…
And luckily, I came up with the Potato Day Festival – voted in the top 9 (9??) strangest food festivals in the world (Wanderlust Travel Magazine).
Now this I can get really dig (ha!)! At the potato festival you can eat potatoes, cook potatoes, peel potatoes, dig up potatoes, or carry huge sacks of potatoes.
You can be crowned Miss Tater-Tot (and ladies, who doesn’t want to be known as Princess Spud or the Queen of Potatoes!)
But once I found out there was a mashed potato wrestling competition, Fargo, you really started to get my attention…
But then, oh Caloo Kalay, I stumbled upon the mashed potato sculpture competition!
Fargo, you have shown me whole new level of awesome…
Why don’t you have this on your home page? Instead of “North of normal” as your tourist tag, why don’t you go with “Fargo –the official home mashed potato sculptures”? I could have avoided all those dismal museums…
Fargo, look, I don’t think I’ll stay. We’ll sculpt with our potatoes at home thank you very much.