Hundreds of miles ago as we drove through the endless plains of Saskatchewan, we had spent hours and hours looking over every inch of our road atlas, hoping to find something interesting in our path ahead. Then, there it was, a bright red dot just outside of Rugby, ND. Bright red type. "Geographic Center of North America."

I was skeptical. After all, Rugby ND lies somewhere between 46 degrees or 47 degrees N, north of the center of the Northern Hemisphere, if that's what they meant.

But we pulled into Rugby and there it was, a stone obelisk standing next to Highway 2 in the parking lot of the town cafe. We pulled over, parked the car, and I quickly jumped out, eager to read the bronzed sign. For a moment my skepticism faded as I read "In 1933 the US Army Corps of Engineers determined through detailed land surveys and cartographical analysis that the center of North America was located on this exact spot in Rugby, North Dakota."

Wow! That sounded official.

It went on to explain that it defined the center as the point on which Mexico, the US, and Canada would balance -- thus the shift north since Canada is a wider land-mass than Mexico. Cool! They had me.

Then I read the last sentence. "In 1963 the monument was moved to accommodate road construction." What! How can you just casually move the geographic center of North America. Phoey! I was more impressed with The World's Largest Tepee that we'd passed back in Alberta. Oh well, there was nothing to do now but push on.

Our road trip paused for a few days near Grand Forks, North Dakota, to visit Sarah's sister and brother-in-law, Karna and Mike. Our big baby of a yellow Lab, Loki, would be spending the next year on their farm, so we were here to drop him off and spend some quality time with our 2 year old nephew, Soren. Aside from the cries of Loki (who wasn't used to sleeping outside alone) it was a great couple of days, filled with delightful dinner companions and peaceful walks through the fields.

We were in a major potato growing region, on a potato farm, during potato harvest, on the official Grand Forks Potato Days weekend. We were too late for the French Fry Fry-Off, but we saw the Potato Parade and were in town for the Potato Bowl football game. I learned a lot about potatoes.

I also learned that although Grand Forks has a vibrant business and intellectual community, it is a culinary desert. Sarah and I offered to make dinner one night. We got our recipes, jotted down the ingredients, and drove in to town. We went to the biggest, glistening, gleaming, grocery store we could find, all broad aisles and smiling clerks. But a gourmand's delight it was not. It had a larger selection of white bread than it did of cheese, and believe that's saying a lot because they had a huge selection of American cheese. But they did serve hot potatoes with your favorite fixins', so I ain't gonna argue.

The Potato Parade benefited greatly from some stiff inter-lodge competition amongst the Shriners. The first lodge to come by was a disappointment -- 2 fat guys on Harleys. No fancy manoeuvres, just a lot of revving interrupted by short bolts of speed to catch up with the girl's figure skating club tripping along on roller blades ahead of them.

The next Shriner lodge upped the ante a bit. Ten aging Shiners in a sort of converted open-sided farm trolley sang feebly into microphones that were propped in front of their bobbing heads. Clearly this was the lodge to belong to back in '31. At the head of the trolley, a way-to-enthusiastic guy with a moustache -- the only post-war Shiner on in the group -- sang loudly and tried to muster some life out of the rest. I'm not sure what they were singing, but we all applauded loudly for the effort.

The third lodge was the most practiced. 20 or 25 guys on golf carts performed an intricate dance of the sugar plum fairies, or whatever you'd call their gasoline-powered ballet. We probably won't see such grace again until the Synchronized Swimming finals in Sydney. It was nice, but not quite original enough for my Golden Shriner Hat award.

Finally, the fourth lodge came down main street with something just bizarre enough to knock our socks off. Let me try to explain.

Say you have two perfectly good cars, two sedans. Your average guy would think, "Cool, I've got two perfectly good cars." Your Shriner from lodge four, however, thinks "Someone give me a blowtorch and an arc welder."

Driving down Main Street was a car that consisted of 2 cars with their rear-ends cut off and then welded together back-to-back. We're talking 2 drivers, 2 steering wheels, 2 engines, facing opposite directions, 1 car. The effect was very odd. Each guy could steer, so the car could go forward, backwards, or sideways. While that may not sound exciting to you, let's just say that the poor candidate for governor in the next float had a hard act to follow, and most of the crowd didn't catch his smiling face because they were too busy watching the shrinermobile slide around the corner a block down the road.

Inevitably, Sunday morning came and it was time to leave. Fellow dog owners out there might be able to gauge our feelings. Sure he's just a dog, but he's a darn good one and I'm going to miss him. I guess, though, in this age of easy travel with airplanes to whisk you around the world and golden arches and Starbucks to greet you, a person needs a few tough goodbyes to make it feel like you're really undertaking something adventurous.