The first time I set my feet down on North Dakota soil was the day I moved here. I officially knew two people, my red-headed toddler and my big grinned husband. The End.

Who actually lives in North Dakota? Where is it again? By Wisconsin or something? Do they have a Target there? We’ll get rich, right? The ever broadening land of the internets should have answered these and many other questions for me, but it didn’t. A town I was trying to find information about (Belfield, ND) was literally on different places on the map depending on which website I looked at. The population of our destination (Watford City, ND) was 2,100 on one site and 18,000 on another ??? It’s 2014, internet, catch up!

So I’m here to tell you the real story. I’m here to get to the bottom of the population of Watford and the exact location of Belfield. More than that I’d like to find out where people get their Diet Coke and what the h-e-double hockey sticks moms do with their children in the dead of winter (and where can I buy those hockey sticks?) I want to know if there really is a place where women serve coffee in lingerie and if man camps are as gross as they seem. I want to know, survive, and figure out how to be happy on the cold frontier.

I’ve been a working woman for the last 6 years (not the coffee serving lingerie wearing kind, but the sign language interpreting kind) in Northern Utah and am now embarking on being a stay-at-home mom in the frozen tundra. My husband got a job in the oil industry, duh, and for some reason this unknown place seemed really appealing to us. I graduated with a degree in writing way back and promptly stopped writing so I think it’s about time I unearthed my forgotten hobby as I begin my new life.

Please join me (I mean that literally, like, please, come to my house).