I am back, safe and sound and functioning in all my working parts. Roy Jacobsen told you in Comments about my little emergency, which he helped to resolve. In essence, when I was checking my oil just prior to setting out, I found that my car hood wouldn’t latch. So I tied it down with a nylon tie-down strap, and set out.

A short time on the freeway convinced me I ought to have a second strap. So I had to get off the highway and find an auto parts store (Target didn’t stock them. They have almost nothing automotive anymore, I discovered). I found a NAPA at last, bought a strap, and I set out again, but the hood was still shivering in the wind, especially when a semi truck passed, and the air scoop was diminishing my gas mileage radically.

I met Roy for lunch in Fargo, as arranged, and he offered to call a guy he knows who can usually fix these things. The guy agreed to see the car, and we drove over. He spent a minute looking at it and thirty seconds bending the latch with a screwdriver, and then it worked as if it had been engineered by a German.

Many thanks, Roy.

The guy wouldn’t let me pay him, but I gave him a signed copy of The Year of the Warrior, which doubtless confused him greatly.

So on I went across the plains, westward toward the land of sunset. There was harvest activity in the wide fields, and great clouds of birds, including seagulls, were flocking to do the final gleaning.

I arrived in Minot at about 7:00 p.m., called Ragnar on my cell phone, and learned that the group was at the fairgrounds (where Høstfest lives), still at work on setup.

I found that we had been given a section of Touchstone Energy’s Copenhagen Hall, a sort of large alcove which used to house a small stage for minor musical acts. This was a bad venue for that sort of thing, since it was just around the corner from the top secondary stage (where the Oak Ridge Boys would be performing twice daily this year). But it worked very well for our purposes. We had four of our Viking tents set up, along with several of the informational signs from the Smithsonian Viking exhibition in St. Paul, which had been given to us when the exhibit moved on. We’ve been storing the things for a few years now, and have never had a place to use them before.

The downside is that they’re very big and very heavy. Sadly, I was too late to help set the stuff up (So sad. So sad).

Then followed four days of doing my leather tooling, selling my books (I made a little money. Did OK), and doing sets of three combat bouts, three times a day, with Ragnar, in a sort of huge sandbox that had been set up in one corner.

The combats, of course, were a big success, especially with the kids. Ragnar and I worked up an educational patter to introduce and punctuate the fights, which gave us a little chance to get our breath between bouts. Unfortunately, the one combat I missed, which Ragnar did as a training session with a couple of our guys, was the one the local TV filmed. But the trainee beat Ragnar, and I’m told his broad smile played very well for the cameras. (I think the final score between Ragnar and me was about 50/50, draws included.)

Speaking of cameras, I was interviewed (or at least questioned briefly) by a film crew from Norway doing some sort of documentary. So I may be seen on NRK or something, in mail, somewhere down the line. What I mostly recall is that the interviewer was a spectacularly gorgeous woman.

I’m probably forgetting things, but I’ll blog more about Høstfest tomorrow. I’ll probably tell you about Sissel’s concert then, too. Yes, she did arrive, and yes, I did enjoy the show very much.

Saturday night it took us four hours to tear the display down. We got done around 11:00. I went home to my host’s house, slept in a bit, then drove to Dale Nelson’s place in Mayville. He and his lovely wife Dorothea, and their lovely daughter Lynnea (they have other lovely daughters, but I didn’t see much of them) and their dog and numerous cats made me very welcome (well, the dog was a little ambivalent, but you know how perceptive dogs are). Dale treated me to a viewing of the DVD of Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, which I’d never seen before.

Much thanks to the Nelsons.

And now I’m home. And I’m tired.

So I’ll end this post here.