Rapid City, South Dakota: A great downtown and the lovely Black Hills are just out of town, this is my second visit to Rapid City and I enjoyed it as much the second time around. I suspect the sex scene is decent here, but I didn't even try to find it. Instead, I was visiting Mount Rushmore and roaming among the bison in Custer Park. This is a wonderful part of the country for sightseeing and Rapid City is a neat town.

Fargo, North Dakota: I loved this town. It is like many of the mid-sized towns I visited in this drive across the land of in between. Dynamic if small downtowns that are thriving with traffic, shops and lots to see and do. It will surprise many of us city folks who are only now beginning to "revitalize" our own downtowns to find small cities far ahead of us. Fargo is in the middle of a big downtown redevelopment. Walk the streets these days and you'll count at least 5 local coffee houses and not a single Starbucks. Home to 3 colleges and the only real city in the state of North Dakota, it is the place to be if you want to be up here.

I wish I could weave some hot, sexy story about sex, but my only sexual adventure was into the downtown bookstore, Adult Book and Cinema, located across from the Greyhound. I had high hopes because, generally speaking, when it comes to publicly available spaces for sex in these parts, the adult bookstore is it. I should have been clued in by the fact that Fargo-based North Dakota State University had loads of toilet action listed at CRUISING for SEX. The problem at this bookstore: every booth in the arcade has a glass window that fully exposes anyone in the booth. Zero privacy. About the only way to hope for privacy is to breath so heavily the window fogs up. In a small town like this what are the odds the hot dudes you see on the street want to be seen in a booth having sex with themselves, much less another guy? Try just about non-existent.

Among the pictures, a little explanation for a couple of them. The flag shot is the location, literally in a cow field, of the center of the United States. Located about 20 miles north of Belle Fourche, South Dakota which has a big monument in the town claiming to be the center, the truth is they just put the monument in town because they figured no one would want to travel 20 miles out into some fields to mark the real spot. The center, by the way, is based not on the lower 48, but includes Hawaii and Alaska in the calculations.

The metal artwork of the birds in flight and those browsing along the prairie are found along the Enchanted Highway in western North Dakota near the tiny town of Regent, a place with virtually no business but it does have an espresso bar and free wi-fi! The Enchanted Highway is the brainchild and actual sweat work of one man, Gary Greff, who is a self-proclaimed bachelor for life according to some of the signage posted along the route. Greff did this to give people a reason to visit his mostly empty part of this otherwise desolate state. It worked -- at least for me.