-
Prairie Adventure: Walnut Grove’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Days
For several Saturdays each summer the small town of Walnut Grove, Minnesota hosts their annual Laura Ingalls Wilder Days. The town’s park is filled with tents and prairie exhibits and traditional pioneer food like cotton candy and funnel cakes. The girls made corn husk dolls. We were again so fortunate that the weather, while warm, was not the usual summer…
-
Prairie Adventure: Plum Creek campground
Our days on this epic road journey have been so filled with adventure and mosquitoes and prairie wind and incredible photo opportunities that we are all pretty much walking around in a state of overload. Everywhere we turn we are finding new little nuggets of fascinating info about Laura and about the prairie and, you know, even about one another.…
-
Prairie Adventure: Walnut Grove’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum
Walnut Grove. If you have met Laura Ingalls primarily through the television series then you might be more familiar with Walnut Grove than some of the other Laura Ingalls spots. It’s a tiny tiny town with nary a recognizable restaurant or grocery store. We ate lunch (and breakfast) at Nellie’s cafe because it was named Nellie and because it was…
-
Prairie Adventure: Plum Creek
I no longer have any idea what day it is. Does leaving your normal town and standard routine have this same effect on you? I also mostly do not know what hour it is. We are only one time zone off but that’s just enough to kick me off balance. Today was Plum Creek day. As in – on the…
-
Prairie Adventure: Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Pepin and Stockholm
Ya’ll. I’m a little sleepy tonight and I think there’s a giant rock under my sleeping bag but the kids ditched the comfy hammocks this evening and I felt obligated to sleep near them in the tent per their kind requests so I’m keeping this post brief. In Pepin there was a small museum dedicated to our girl Laura. It…
-
Prairie Adventure: the birthplace of Laura Ingalls Wilder
Unassuming. A small cabin in a big woods. 1867. A little girl born in a gray log house. Laura Ingalls. And her voice and her story and her charming way with words have traveled across the years and the valleys to speak into my own childhood and into the childhood in which my children are living right now. Seven miles…
-
Prairie Adventure: toys and tents and eagles. and the Mississippi River.
It hasn’t even been very long yet and my days are already blending together. That’s how travel goes I think. Off schedule and out of routine in a haphazard, purposely random fantastic kind of out of control way. There was a toy store today. A giant family-owned toy store with a cute bird name. Lark. We had given the kids…
-
Prairie Adventure: it takes a long time to get out there
Are you wondering when we are ever going to actually get to the prairie? When will we ever step foot on Laura’s soil? Yeah. Me too. It takes a long time to get from the south to the mid-west. I told the kids as we were riding along, “Guys. We will change time zones in a few minutes. It’s like…
-
Prairie Adventures: at the beginning
You know every trip actually begins before you get in the car, right? This trip had a rocky start Friday night at the car rental location. It wasn’t pretty. It started with Hertz and ended with Budget. It started with a way I thought things should go and ended with Kevin and I standing in the car rental parking lot,…
-
What The Road Will Look Like From Here.
Because I like a plan. Because I’m a faithful fan of expressed expectations. Because I just really feel like it …. I want to tell you my basic idea for this blog space whilst our family is on the road during the next two weeks. Tomorrow we hit the pavement for our much-anticipated-by-our-own-family Prairie Adventure. We’re certainly not traveling to…
-
Tricks of the Trade: Storing Our Souvenirs
This summer’s Prairie Adventure is crashing in at our door. blink. blink. And the car will be loaded and we will be on our way. (I only wish packing a car for a two week trek was that painless. I really do.) Last year I saw this idea on Pinterest and I snagged it for last spring’s Harbor Island vacation. First,…
-
July Fourth – Another Beautiful One on Record
July Fourth on The Farm. It seemed to last a blink of an eye this year. There were still people I didn’t get to really chat with and I think there was dessert I didn’t get to spoon onto my plate. It’s always a bounty of good times. A bevy of conversations to have. A moving from here to there…
-
Cross Country Cousins
We were blessed by a wonderful summer treat last weekend – a visit from our Wyoming cousins. You know, it is not often when West meets East and it had been far too long since our family has had the pleasure of being in the company of these two sweet girls. The kids had a fabulous day together – playing…