Wisconsin, Minnesota and South Dakota

Almost a week has passed since our last post due to lack of Internet service. Friday was a busy day at the Noah’s Ark Waterpark in the Wisconsin Dells. The kids, of course, were in heaven! Carsyn was a little scared to go down the waterslide, but my mode of operation is to throw my kids in and hedge my bets that they will end up liking it. She fussed the whole way down her first slide, and said she wasn’t going to go again, but after sitting out the second round, she must have decided it was not so bad after all and slid the rest of the day with us with a giant smile on her face.

The lines were manageable, so we finished the day feeling like we had done enough. We headed to Moosejaw Pizza – a place we had read about in Family Fun Magazine – and it was definitely worth the visit. The pizza was some of the best we’d ever had.

After that, we went to the Tommy Bartlett Waterski Show, which had been recommended not only by Family Fun Magazine, but also by our friends Ken and Louise Gregory, who had been here the previous week with their family (how ironic). It featured fancy skiing/boating, as well as some juggling, and cirque-style entertainment followed by a pretty cool laser show.

We couldn’t leave Wisconsin without picking up some cheese. You would have thought we’d never seen the stuff the way we ogled it in the cheese store. A friend of Cheryl’s insisted we try FRESH cheese curds. Note that they had to be FRESH. So we found such cheese curds, and with high anticipation we popped them in our mouths…hmmm…not exactly sure what fresh cheese curds were supposed to be like, but these were chewy…squeaky…yes, squeaky…a little salty. Yuck… well, maybe not yuck…actually pretty good… hey, let me have another piece of that squeaky cheese… OK, now I’m sick. That’s enough of the cheese turds… I’m mean curds…

On Saturday morning, we packed up to go to Minnesota while the kids played putt putt at the campground (yes, more putt putt). Since the campground “loaned out” bicycles from a shack next to the putt putt course, some kid rode off on Carsyn’s bike, so we had to circle the campground until we found the perpetrator – a slight girl in a bathing suit. After toting the bike back to camp, Cameron and I went to check on the progress of our laundry in the laundry house, but stopped at the shack to suggest that they mark their bikes with a Sharpy pen. No sooner than Cameron dropped his bike so we could walk in and put more quarters in the dryer did some kid ride off on HIS bike! Geez!

In a huff, I went into the main office and “expressed my displeasure,” suggesting once again that they get a handle on this situation. Cameron summed up the exchange like this: “Mommy was yelling at old people.” I like to think I kept my cool, but I must admit that I did pound my fist on the counter.

Anyway, we found the bike and headed out to ride the Wisconsin Ducks, WW II army vehicles that can travel on land and water. We enjoyed seeing the glacial carvings in the sandstone along the Wisconsin River, but the engine was loud and the exhaust made me a little nauseated. We all agreed that we don’t need to do that again. After the ride, we planned to go to the Ringling Brothers Museum, but instead decided to trek on toward Walnut Grove, Minnesota. I’m thinking now that it would have been nice to see it, because we spent that evening in a Wal-Mart parking lot so we could get going early to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood home…

…which is a tourist trap. The museum is a poor attempt, although there seemed to be a lot of LHOTP fans milling about. I’d say the books and TV show were the best things that ever happened to this place! It looked like they had scraped up every “old” thing they had laying around, put it in one place, and called it a museum. We did enjoy, however, the actual site of the Ingalls’ “dugout” house, Plum Creek, and the surrounding farmland where Pa Ingalls grew his crops.You could just imagine Laura and Mary splashing around the little creek in summertime. The crops of soybeans and corn stretched for miles in every direction.

We decided to drive through town to find Nelly’s Cafe (closed and hardly charming from the outside), the bell Pa helped purchase for the church, and Oleson’s Merchantile (also not much to look at.) The town looked deserted, but when we did see people, they were all Asian, which seemed odd.

The next morning (Monday), we packed up for De Smet,. South Dakota, but before we left, we decided to stop by Oleson’s Merchantile to get mashed pennies for the kids. “Ms. Oleson” (well, I don’t know her name, but we called her that) was quite charming and offered us a cappuccino. We asked about the Asian people, and she said that they are Laotians who came from St. Paul to escape the growing gang culture among the Vietnam-era refugees who had settled there. They had seen Walnut Grove in the LHOTP series and thought it looked interesting, so they all moved there!

We arrived in De Smet in the afternoon and stayed at the Ingalls family homestead, which is the actual piece of property (160 acres) that Charles Ingalls claimed in the Homestead Act of 1862. He was able to cultivate 10 acres of it for five years to actually own the piece of property, which he managed to accomplish. A family bought the property 11 years ago and created a replica of the house and barn, and brought in a school house and some other buildings that would have been around during the time the Ingalls live there. Five of Pa’s cottontrees survived on one end of the property, which has been turned into a memorial.

When we arrived, Carsyn looked at me and said, “Are we in Soufakota YET???” to which I replied, “Yes, dear. This is South Dakota.” She looked around and said, in equal parts disbelief and disappointment: “Soufakota is a CAMPGROUND??”

The homestead exhibit was much more impressive than Walnut Grove, but what we enjoyed most was the peace. From a knoll at the top of the property, we could see at least 10 miles in each direction, and we could hear was the gentle wind, the locusts and birds chirping, and the occasional bleat of a cow and her six-week-old calf. We took a horse and wagon ride around the property to an old schoolhouse, where a teacher waited to give the boys a cowboy hat and dress the girls in a bonnet and pinafore before starting a mock session of school. The kids really enjoyed it, and I think they are really getting a feel for how far we’ve come in 130 years. At the replica house, the kids washed clothes by hand and fed them through the wringer before hanging them on the line. Carsyn couldn’t get enough of the wringer… I’m thinking of getting her a wash bin, wringer, and line for our house… I hope there isn’t a law against having a four-year-old do the laundry…

We played on the homestead until dusk because it was just that fun. The kids were up the following morning (Tuesday), eager to run down to the barn to make ropes, corn cob dolls, and see the horses, pony, and foal, as well as a litter of kittens the barn loft. I really hated leaving the homestead, having become smitten with the prairie.

We trekked into downtown De Smet to get our last fill of the Ingalls-Wilder story, with a visit to the Surveyors’ House where the family wintered their first year in De Smet. We also visited the big house that Pa built (it had been beautifully restored), a school that Laura attended, and the school where Laura teached, which had only recently been acquired and moved nearer to the other buildings. The group was just beginning to restore it. We finished the tour by visiting the cemetery where Ma, Pa, Carrie, and Mary were buried.

We are now on our way to the Badlands of South Dakota. If I thought the crops spanned for miles in Wisconsin and Minnesota, nothing compares to the vast expanses of corn, hay, and sunflowers in South Dakota. The view is more like 40 to 50 miles out here. We are on our way to a campground that has the word “resort” in the name. I have high hopes that it lives up to my expectations!