Up at 6:30 on Saturday for an early breakfast with Deb at Darcy’s Café, an old-fashioned, family-operated diner. Portions were huge - we had pumpkin-cinnemon pancakes and Country Eggs Benedict - and food was delicious. After breakfast we drove through different nice neighborhoods along the Red River and checked out the dam or dike, which was constructed after the devastating flood of 1997. The land between the dike and the river is called the "Greenway" and has a lot of trails to offer. Grand Forks is the third-largest city in the state of North Dakota (after Fargo and Bismarck) with around 60,000 and has a twin city, too: East Grand Forks, Minnesota. A huge sugar beets factory with its smoking chimneys (Crystal Sugar) is dominant, but medical industry, NDU (the university) and Grand Forks Air Force Base are also main employers. GF has to offer some nice city parks and an attractive downtown area with historic buildings and a surprising restaurant scene.
Aerospace Tour - our next stop was at the John D. Odegard School Of Aerospace Sciences at the University of North Dakota - a world-renowned center for aerospace learning, especially for aviation education. Our guide was about to become a pilot himself and he not only showed us the university facility with flight simulators, before we drove out to the hangar and the Piper training planes at the airport (pic).
The campus of UND - University of North Dakota -, founded in 1883, covers a big area in Grand Forks and with about 14,000 students is famous for aerospace, law and medicine. And, for hockey! "The Ralph", how they call the state-of-the-art hockey stadium, was our next stop after lunch and beertasting at Half Brothers. Ralph Engelstad was a member of the UND hockey team in 1948 and played goalie for two years. Lateron he became wealthy in the construction business and became UND’s most generous benefactor. The Ralph Engelstad Arena, where we got a tour, is considered one of the finest hockey facilities in the world,with about 11,500 seats, and could easily compete with our German professional 1st league stadiums. In the evening, we watched the season opener against Manitoba with a big pregame party, and it was a lively attractive game, won by the "Fighting Hawks" (formerly "Sioux").
Before the game we had dinner at Rhombus Brewing Company (pic on right) - one of two breweries in GF. The 15-barrel brewhouse is situated in an old opera house and was founded in 2015 by two guys who started out with a mobile smoothie stand, turned into pizza cooks (multiple pizza locations now) and to brewery owners. Their original head brewer, Chad Gunderson, moved on in 2017 and founded his own brewery with his half brother and called it "Half Brothers Company" (pics below). In this brewery/taproom we had lunch. It's sort of a community place with concerts, local art exhibitions, a beergarden and good pizza. Rhombus is larger, more fancy, but beers were equally good in both places. We specially loved their IPAs with its funny names,,,
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen