A vacation in North Dakota

The idea for the trip started, as it often does, in the group chat. 

As it came time for my two best friends and me to decide on a destination for our semiregular girlfriends getaway, we started kicking around ideas. Would we fly to New Orleans and eat ourselves silly? Would we head to Montreal for a big-city weekend and singlehandedly improve U.S.-Canada relations? 

Or would we go to the one state all of us had never visited: North Dakota. 

The last time the three of us vacationed together, we met in California, which this year is projecting 275.5 million visitors. 

North Dakota, by comparison, tallied about 25.6 million visitors in 2025, the most recent data available. 

The Peace Garden State started as a dark-horse candidate for our trip, but it soon moved to a clear front-runner. Hiking Theodore Roosevelt National Park would give the trip an active component. As it turns out, Fargo has a small but mighty restaurant scene with a couple of James Beard Award finalists: Nikki Ness Berglund and Ryan Nitschke are partners who run a restaurant called Luna Fargo and stalls in the food hall at Brewhalla, a mixed-use development in town.

Quirky shops, walleye burgers, the Badlands, a long drive with good friends. What else could we ask for? Perhaps a fresh answer to the age-old cocktail-party question: “Vacationing anywhere interesting?” 

Responses to “North Dakota” elicited surprise, curiosity and, in the case of our former editor in chief, a very gratifying “Wow!”

And so we set our sights on the appropriately named FAR, aka Hector International Airport, a nine-gate facility that primarily offers service to Midwestern megahubs like Minneapolis and Chicago but also Phoenix (thanks to Allegiant) and Dallas. 

Brewhalla, a funky mixed-use development anchored by Drekker Brewing Co., the food hall and a hotel, became our primary stamping grounds. The Brewhalla hotel’s quirks included the promise of earplugs to cancel out the noise from adjacent rail lines. 

During the day, we browsed shops on Broadway and ate at Pounds, a restaurant where chicken tendies, poutine, “gooda mac” and “hippie bowls” are on the menu.   

Across the Red River in Moorhead, Minn., we got a taste of the area’s Scandinavian heritage at Viking Ship Park, which houses a replica of a Norwegian stave church and the remnants of a classic ship built by locals who sailed it from the Great Lakes to Norway. The ship is in a museum where a striking, giant, white, sail-like tarp stretches over the masts. More typical of a girls’ weekend getaway was a visit to the Starbird Lounge, a retro tiki bar where drinks were served in glasses shaped like pineapples and peacocks.

Then we headed west across the state, and the extremely flat aspect of the Red River Valley turned to rolling prairie and then, suddenly, to craggy depressions, buttes and multicolored breaks. This is the Grasslands and the striking Badlands, where the Little Missouri River has eroded the land into fascinating forms. 

The town of Medora, which serves as the entrance to the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, was gearing up for an influx of visitors to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, which opened this summer just a few weeks after our visit. Even early in the season, I could see that Medora would be a busy tourist hub, with or without the library; it already hosts visitor must-dos like the Medora Musical, a country-western show put on every summer at the Burning Hills Amphitheatre that celebrates the history of Medora, T.R. and Americana. 

There are several hotels and motels, and the Medora Campground has multiple hookups for RVs of multiple lengths, a good indicator of a robust drive market. A video on Medora’s website claims that the Medora Musical brings in more than 200,000 visitors a year. 

My girlfriends and I lucked into the annual Spring into Summer Wine Walk where, for $25 per person, we walked  from Medora Uncork’d wine bar from shop to shop for drinks, snacks and chat. The second night, exhausted from hikes on the Maah Daah Hey Trail and the national park, we holed up with a pot pie made in South Dakota and purchased at the Family Fare Supermarket in Dickinson. 

I enjoyed a glass of Saumur-Champigny wine, recommended to me by the folks at Mangata Wine Bar back in Fargo, as the Badlands buttes faded to black and the stars came out. 

And I wondered: Why don’t more people come to North Dakota? 

Small-state tourism

It’s a question that destination marketers in small tourism states like North Dakota contend with regularly.

MMGY’s Portrait of American Travelers surveys U.S. consumers on where they plan to travel in the next two years. Predictably, Hawaii, Florida, California, Colorado and New York are the top five states. 

Arkansas, Indiana, Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa sit at the bottom of the MMGY list. North Dakota ranks 43, tied with Oklahoma and Mississippi. 

It’s difficult to compare visitor numbers, since each state has a different approach to measuring arrivals, budgets and return on investment.

But big tourism states have the might and marketing muscle to reach across multiple markets, both domestically and internationally. According to the Hawaii Tourism Authority’s report for the 2025 fiscal year, for example, the state allocated $63 million in general funds to the HTA, which spent nearly $40 million on marketing in the U.S., Japan, Korea, Europe and elsewhere. 

In December, Visit Florida issued a statement praising Gov. Ron DeSantis for proposing $80 million for tourism investment in the 2026-2027 budget. North Dakota’s tourism budget is around $10 million, with about $4.2 million devoted to marketing.

“It makes us mindful about how we use data and insights to make every dollar count,” said Sara Otte Coleman, the state’s tourism director. 

She has a team of 15, but they have multiple marketing duties working for the state’s Department of Commerce. “I kind of describe us as the chief marketing office for the state of North Dakota, beyond just our targeted work to drive visitation and visitor dollars,” Coleman said.

Tourism marketers say that when their state doesn’t have a focal-point attraction, they face an uphill battle for visitors. One of North Dakota’s biggest attractions is Roosevelt National Park, but it’s a relatively modest one: The park received just under 730,000 visitors in 2025, according to the National Park Service. California’s Yosemite National Park, by contrast, drew over 4 million. 

“We haven’t had huge budgets to promote and tell the story like other states have, and we also don’t have the one iconic attraction,” Coleman said. “I mean, [Arizona] has the Grand Canyon, South Dakota has Mount Rushmore, Washington, D.C., has the National Mall, Florida’s got Disney.”

Coleman also pointed out that states with a low population density — there are 800,000 residents of North Dakota — also miss out on traffic from visitors who fly or drive in to see family.

The rub is that once visitors do get to North Dakota (as we did), they love it (as we did). 

“I think that’s probably the biggest thing we hear all the time, that it exceeded expectations,” Coleman said. “We always want to exceed expectations. But it also presents that marketing challenge that they didn’t know what there was to see and do and what to expect, and so we know that’s something we have to deal with as the marketing entity.”

Tourism work to do

Tourism organizations also have to spend time dispelling myths about a state: That it’s flat. That’s it’s too far, too cold, too hot, too expensive. Or that there’s nothing to do.

But as Jenn Gjerde, executive director of Nebraska Tourism, put it, “every state has cool things.”

Some marketers have taken a tongue-in-cheek approach. Nebraska got a good deal of press for a daring campaign, “Honestly. It’s not for everyone.” But the slogan was retired a few years ago and replaced with “Nebraska: All heart.” 

Nebraska has a $6.4 million budget allocated to tourism marketing, and in 2024 it recorded $4.6 million in direct travel spend. The state has an emerging golf scene; urbane options in Omaha and Lincoln; activities like “tanking,” where people float down a shallow river in a livestock tank; and biking a rail-to-trail conversion called the Cowboy Trail.

“I think a lot of people are looking for a vacation in this era of technology — a vacation that allows them to slow down,” Gjerde said. “Nebraska is definitely a place where you can do that.” 

The story is similar in Delaware. Sandwiched between heavy hitters New York, Philadelphia and Washington, the First State has a $1 million marketing budget and has to think creatively to stretch its dollars to attract people to its beaches, du Pont Estates, Wilmington dining and beyond. 

Some of that creativity goes to social content that can be repurposed and shared. Delaware partnered with an account called Accidentally Wes Anderson, which creates content in the distinctive milieu of the movie director, and with Atlas Obscura. Jessica Welch, director of the Delaware Tourism Office, said the office was then able to amplify the content in different ways and promote the unique aspects of Delaware, like its Apple Scrapple Festival and the Dover Motor Speedway’s Miles the Monster statue.

The state had about 20 million day visitors and 10.2 million overnight visitors in 2024, the most recent figures available. Visitors spent about $7 billion.

For most states with a lot of tourism heart but not a big footprint or a big airport, one strategy is to focus primarily on drive vacationers. Delaware has a three-tier strategy. Local markets like Philadelphia and Harrisburg, Pa., are in Tier 1, upstate New York is in Tier 2, and cities like Atlanta and Detroit are in Tier 3. 

Nebraska’s target markets are Minneapolis, Denver, Oklahoma City, St. Louis and Kansas City. But when opportunity strikes — like the World Cup — states change tactics. “I can tell you, this summer … we hit Kansas City really hard,” Gjerde said. 

Delaware ran campaigns in Brazil and France targeting soccer fan clubs.

‘Something different’

Here are some things that North Dakota doesn’t have: A major hub airport. A major-brand luxury hotel. A wellness-focused resort. A big beach scene. Michelin-star dining (though don’t sleep on Fargo; we dined extremely well there and without pretense). 

But here’s something North Dakota does have: an unspoiled freshness and friendly residents. For people who are interested in American history, there’s the transformative story of Roosevelt and many opportunities to experience and understand the state’s Indigenous tribes. 

A youthful, cool aesthetic seemed to permeate Fargo. We had several serendipitous moments where we became part of local gatherings. We wandered among Fargoans who were lined up in Brewhalla for The Plant Supply store’s big annual sale. When we walked into the Plains Art Museum, staff was setting up for its spring gala. During the Medora wine walk, we struck up so many conversations with shopkeepers and fellow wine walkers that I had to hound my chatty friends to keep to the schedule.

For Joe Conroy, the founder of American Classic Tours, that friendliness is one of the biggest draws. “It’s a real place, with real people” is how he put it. 

American Classic Tours developed a North Dakota guided tour about eight years ago in response to a group that wanted an “itinerary that’s different.” The tour takes in Fargo, Bismarck and Medora.

“And it was a hit,” Conroy said. “It has sold out every year we’ve offered it.” 

Asked why the tour was so popular, Conroy suggested that the wide-open spaces were a break from crowded attractions in busy destinations. Roosevelt’s legacy is also a draw. Or, frankly, it was just a place they hadn’t been. 

“Some trips we do and we pause them,” Conroy said. “One we did was in Oklahoma. There are fascinating things there, too, and that was popular. There are certain groups of folks out there who will want to do it.”

He added, “Whether it’s Kansas, Nebraska and other less-visited places: If you put an itinerary together and market it the right way, there will be people who will go.”

The 50-state quest: What counts as a ‘real visit’?

Delaware has no shortage of pass-through visitors, as the busy I-95 corridor runs through the top of the state. 

Does getting out of the car at the Delaware Travel House rest stop qualify as “a visit” for so-called state collectors? 

It might for some, but state tourism director Jessica Welch maintains that people aren’t really seeing the state that way. 

“So many people are like, ‘I’ve driven through Delaware,’” she said, recalling interactions with people at travel shows. “And I’m like, ‘Well, that doesn’t count. You have to visit somewhere in Delaware. You have to stay overnight for it to count.’”

Welch said that once people visit, they’re predisposed to come back: 83% of people who have visited Delaware end up returning. “So it’s getting them to see Delaware in a different light and to discover those different hidden gems.”

In Nebraska, where I-80 cuts through the center of the state, tourism director Jenn Gjerde urges people to get off the interstate and see the unique topography. She added that her own rule is to give money to a small business in order for a visit to count.

North Dakota has a robust and growing daytrip market, but it’s too far north to be a pass-through state; in general, state collectors have to consciously go there. That might be why the state has earned an unusual kind of fame. In many cases, it’s the last state people visit (by whatever metric they choose to count those visits).

Enter the Best For Last Club. 

Destination marketer Visit Fargo-Moorhead operates the club. To join, all you have to do is visit the other 49 states and then make an appearance in North Dakota. According to the visitor center’s website, inductees get a “Best For Last” T-shirt, a certificate and an “occasional round of applause from staffers.” 

“If you’re on a quest to visit all 50 states, we highly encourage you to save North Dakota for last,” it states. “Why, do you ask? For selfish reasons, really. We want to celebrate with you.”

The Bismarck-Mandan Convention and Visitors Bureau does a similar celebration. It offers 50th staters a swag bag, certificate and “social media love.”

Alaska also sees 50th staters due to its far-flung location. Travel Juneau started giving out Travel Juneau stickers if it hears that it is someone’s 50th state and may implement something more official down the line.

Welch said that the First State is sometimes the last state people visit. Delaware doesn’t offer visitors a T-shirt if it’s their 50th state, but she said, “we could lean into that.”

— R.T.