Category: Travel

It’s all about the pumpkins.

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

My family and I enjoyed a quick trip to a pumpkin patch on Saturday. It’s our fall family tradition to find a good place to get pumpkins that we’ll later carve for our Halloween fun.

This year, we tried out Pumpkin Junction at Blue Skye Farm in Good Thunder, Minn. It’s open for visitors most weekends in October, and it’s one of the few sites we’ve found locally that have not just the pumpkins, but children’s activities and fun things to do, too.

GPS helped us find the farm, off old Hwy 66, and we were one of the first families to arrive. We were greeted by a host who explained the “system” to us. We got a form that listed everything they had for sale, and as we picked out what we wanted, we marked the sheet, paying for everything at the end. She also emphasized that children under 18 got to pick out a free pumpkin, so my girls were pretty excited.

Our first stop was the pumpkin patch. I picked up the clippers, but promptly handed them to husband Matt to wield because I am a notorious clutz. (See the story about the broken leg last winter, if you need further evidence.) We had lovely sunshine, but the wind whipped coldly across the patch as we trudged out in our boots to look at the ripe pumpkins on the vine.

G.G. was along with us, too, and she helped A find a good pumpkin first. By the time we filled our farm-provided green cart, we’d loaded five of our favorite, round, ripe, orange pumpkins. Our next stop was the activity tent, where games and a food booth were set up, as well as tables containing other fall vegetables–varied squash and gourds as well as dried corn.

Our girls picked out sweet treats at the food both (cookies and cupcakes from a local bakery) before we heard the call that the hay rides were starting. We picked up our treats and headed over to the wagon filled with hay bales, drawn behind a tractor. (We like horse-drawn rides best, and cheerfully call ourselves “horse groupies” during the holiday season for our tendency to find where all the horse-drawn rides are, but the tractor worked well, too.)

The tractor made a large loop around the farm, allowing us to see the squash, gourds and pumpkins still in the fields. The girls excitedly squealed each time they saw a new kind of gourd in the field, and C particularly liked the white pumpkins on the ground.

When the long ride was over, we headed to the corrals to see the horses and the calf that were out for petting. Our girls love animals, and visiting the animals, wherever we are, always makes them happy.

The farm also included a hay maze that topped out about five feet in height, which was perfect for small children and their taller parents, but by the time we considered it, we were too cold to stay outside. That whippy wind got the best of us.

Blue Skye Farm is open one more weekend this year.

Meanwhile, what do we do with the pumpkins?

We’ll carve them this week, and I’ll make roasted pumpkin seeds for snacking on.

The Mahkato Wacipi

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

We spent a good portion of our Saturday on the grounds at Land Of Memories Park in Mankato, Minn., for the 46th Annual Mahkato Wacipi, a gathering sponsored by the Shakopee Mdewankanton Sioux Community, the Prairie Island Indian Community, Mankato Area Public Schools, KMSU, and The Center for American Indian Affairs. This year’s theme was “Honoring the 38 Dakota,” and the overall tone was one of reconciliation and reflection about that terrible chapter in Minnesota history.

The 38 refer to the Dakota who were executed on the public square in downtown Mankato on December 26, 1862, in the wake of the Dakota conflicts. The effects of that event and that year on Minnesota culture and living continue to ripple in many ways, and the tribes who sponsor and organize the Wacipi continue to hold it in Mankato in part as a means of calling attention to them, and to foster the reconciliation between First Nation peoples and others in the community.

My husband and I have attended many such gatherings over the years. One of my personal interests in First Nation culture stems from my own search for the roots of the family story that suggests our own descent from one of the tribes on the U.S. eastern seaboard. We can neither confirm nor deny that story at this point, though my search continues.

In those early years of my childhood, I lived in northern Wisconsin, very near the La Courte Oreilles Ojibwa reservation, and in the company of many Ojibwa and St. Croix Chippewa tribe members. While I’ve been told and I’ve read that things were pretty tense in the area of my youth at the time, (it was the late 1970s and the American Indian Movement deeply impacted the area) what I remember was many, many conversations and sharing of cultures.

I distinctly remember a school assembly that featured local tribal leaders in Luck, and my summer day camp featured cultural traditions from the local tribes. One of our guests at that camp was an elder woman who made fry bread over an open fire on the grounds. I remember also trying wild rice and other foods common to our neighbors.

And I remember the drums, and the dancing.

These early events frame my favorite experiences when I go to a gathering. I love to browse the vendor booths featuring handcrafted items, and I always buy at least one pair of earrings. This year’s are hand-cast pewter medallions that feature butterflies. I must taste the fry bread, and I must watch the Grand Entry that features all the dancers and the important songs and ceremony.

We brought our little girls to the Wacipi for the first time this year, and they enjoyed coloring on popsicle sticks to make their own game. They tasted their first fry bread, fresh, hot, and coated in cinnamon sugar. Two elders who sat with us at our picnic table nicknamed my four-year-old “Quick Hands” because she was able to catch her popsicle stick with one hand immediately after dropping it through the crack of the table with the other.

We talked with many people, and my three-year-old literally ran in circles around me as we moved through the grounds. I was able to quietly witness the reconciliation ceremony on Saturday that featured descendants of the 38, while my husband took the girls for another walk through the grounds. But my girls came to me and watched with wide eyes as the Grand Entry began. It featured dancers in order and full regalia, and the rhythm of the drums, the motions of the dance, and the quick melodic jingles of the jingle dresses held their attention through all the first dances.

The Mahkato Wacipi site features a page devoted to dancing etiquette. I’m afraid that my own mobility was limited this year so I didn’t join the dancing, as I often do when Intertribal Dancing is called, but if you’re inspired to go to a Wacipi in the future, do check out the etiquette rules.

The weather was perfect, sunny and cool, and we’ll be glad to go again next September, and meet old and new friends.

And yes, I do have a recipe for Fry Bread. For another post.

The Benefits of Accessible Parks

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

I brought my youngest girls to North Mankato’s newest playground, Fallenstein Park, Saturday, and it reminded me that making play accessible for everyone benefits everyone.

It seems like an obvious statement. But for many years, playgrounds and play areas haven’t been accessible to children with certain disabilities, and in fact, most are also geared toward a specific age range. One of my biggest problems with playgrounds has been a lack of equipment or resources for the youngest children for play. Much of it is unsafe for the littlest of children, and the tendency toward gravel or concrete surfaces on playgrounds also creates potentially hazardous situations.

Let me be clear: I believe that all children require adult supervision on playgrounds, even those considered “safe,” because all active play contains some inherent risk. Children need some risky play in order to learn how to be safe and to learn about their bodies’ personal limits, but an adult should be supervising.

Some playgrounds are safer than others. And the recent movements to make some playgrounds accessible for children of all levels of ability have yielded real benefits for all children.

We have been to three of these parks, in three different cities, and my children loved them. The first was the Universal Playground in Lindenwood Park, Fargo, N.D. The second was in Herman Heights Park, New Ulm, Minn. The third was Fallenstein Park.

All three have inventive and interesting playground equipment that includes some old standards, such as swings and slides, but with improved safety features. The Minnesota parks include zip-lines, and Fallenstein includes a ropes course and climbing equipment that works well for most children.

Each also features a surface that is kind of rubberized. There’s some give to it, and it’s clear that the momentum from a fall would be slowed by it. Its presence also ensures that children in wheel chairs could roam around the playground without much obstacle to their play.

Dozens of children freely played in Fallenstein during our morning there, and I was not the only one who thought the entire space worked well for all the children who could come to play. I overheard other parents talking about how “cool” the place was, and I saw children of all ages engaging with the equipment.

As with all playgrounds, parents do need to closely supervise children on some of the equipment, and steer their children to age-appropriate equipment when necessary. (My three-year-old was too excited about the ropes course, which was higher than I’d like to see her climb, frankly.)

But in building something that made play accessible for children of all abilities, all children benefit. And frankly, most area playgrounds could use the safety upgrade.

Looking ahead to LauraPalooza 2019: Pepin-bound

~ Amy Lauters ~ 1 Comment

The Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association this week announced the location of its 2019 conference, and it’s in Onalaska, Wis., just south of Wilder’s birthplace of Pepin, Wis.

The full announcement also reminds those interested about the big Little House on the Prairie cast reunion in Walnut Grove the week following LauraPalooza in July.

I was involved in the founding of the organization and in the running of the first two conferences, which we held in Mankato in 2010 and 2012. Personal circumstances kept me away from the 2015 conference in South Dakota and the 2017 conference in Missouri, but I’ve been excited to see the line-up of speakers and workshops as they appeared.

The conference was deliberately conceived as a site for Wilder fans, scholars, and independent researchers to meet and share across the usual divides that occur between such different groups. What’s fun about LauraPalooza is that everyone can enjoy interesting, well-researched presentations right alongside fun activities taken from the books, such as ice cream socials, cooking demonstrations, and handwork.

With the next site being close to Pepin, it’s in easy travel distance for me. Pepin is actually the first Little House site I ever visited, the week after I turned 18 in 1990. My friend, Maria, and I tossed a tent and sleeping bags into the back of my 1980 Ford Granada and headed west from Chippewa Falls, Wis., to seek out Little House sites just because we were legal adults and we could.

We took back roads into Pepin and got lost.

Eventually, we found our way, and I still remember the excitement in my belly when we drove up to the little replica cabin on Laura’s birth site. I think I probably squealed. (Maria and I are still in touch; I wonder if she remembers?)

After that first stop, we found our way into Pepin proper to visit the little museum there, then camped in Stockholm, Wis., our first night. The next day, we headed west toward Walnut Grove.

We locked our keys in the car in Faribault, Minn. Fortunately, there was an Auto Zone nearby and we’d left a window open slightly, so that was a free, less-than-fifteen minute fix with a wire coat hanger.

We eventually made it to Walnut Grove, squealing over the museum there (which at that time extended across the road in a series of trailer-type things. It’s been enlarged, renovated, and refurbished since, and is one of my favorite places to stop). We didn’t manage to find Plum Creek on that trip. In fact, my brakes started grinding as we pulled out of Walnut Grove and headed back east.

We camped at Fort Ridgely State Park that night, and wandered our way up to St. Croix Falls, Wis. the following night, before heading back to Chippewa Falls and new brakes.

At LauraPalooza 2010, twenty years later, I waded in Plum Creek for the first time. It’s another one of my favorite memories. I think there’s a picture of me, along with several other Laura enthusiasts, wading in the creek that summer.

I’m excited for 2019. My last published work in the area of Wilder research appeared in the South Dakota Historical Society Press’s work, Pioneer Girl Perspectives, in 2017. My contribution was a chapter about Rose Wilder Lane and her career as a working writer, touching on her FBI file and her work for Woman’s Day magazine.

I haven’t really dug into anything new lately, but I have been thinking about what viewing the Little House books through a cultural lens over time might look like. Why do the books remain popular? I have some ideas about that that I might propose to share in 2019.

Meanwhile, I look forward to seeing the Pepin cabin again. Maybe I can talk Maria into joining me for the almost-thirty year flashback photo.

Adventures in DC: National Museum of African American History and Culture

~ Amy Lauters ~ Leave a comment

This is the line for tickets to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., last Thursday. The museum is the newest of the Smithsonian museums, and timed entry passes, which are free, are booked through December 2018. The only way to get a ticket the day of a visit in D.C., if one didn’t plan six months in advance, is to haunt the web site at 6:30 a.m. or get in line at 1 p.m. for walk-up release tickets.

Fortunately, I had friends who were already in this line, and when I joined it at 12:39, I waited for less than an hour to get a ticket into the museum. It was worth the effort and wait.

I started my visit with lunch at the Sweet Home Cafe, which featured soul food from different areas of the American South. I had buttermilk fried chicken, scratch-made macaroni-and-cheese, and fresh cornbread. My other choices were collard greens, potato salad, gumbo, barbecue, and a wide variety of other foods. I also added a mini-carrot cake to my tray to share with my companions. More on soul food in another post; it’s become one of my cooking goals since I adopted my oldest two children, who are African-American and requested it when they became a part of the family as teens.

After eating, I headed down to the very bottom level, which is where the permanent exhibits begin. They start with the history of the sugar trade in the fifteenth century and the gradual institutionalization of slavery. The exhibits include African artifacts, shackles and pieces of slave ships.

As patrons move through the exhibits chronologically, they move up vertically, too, with the very bottom level dealing with the debates over slavery at the founding of the United States, life as a slave, and the gradual movement, fought for with blood and pain, out of slavery. The ramp up to the next level begins with a presentation about the Emancipation Proclamation, on display next to a draft of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which legally freed the slaves.

Also on that bottom level? Harriet Tubman’s shawl, and Nat Turner’s Bible. For those who don’t know, Tubman escaped the in humane conditions she was living under as a slave, but returned nine times to the South to help others escape. Turner’s rebellion against slaveholders ended with his execution.

The next level outlines the long struggle from freedom through the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, including cabins from all-black settlements and the Emmitt Till Memorial. The counter from the Greensboro Walgreens that witnessed the first sit-in also looms large in this level.

The third level, rising up from the Civil Rights struggles, features contemporary African-American contributions and ends with an exhibit about the first African-American President, Barack Obama.

Outside the permanent exhibits, there are three levels above ground that feature rotating culture galleries. On my visit, one featured Oprah Winfrey and another featured hip-hop music.

The sheer volume of artifacts collected for the Museum, in context, makes the experience both moving and inspirational. I highly recommend a visit on your next trip to D.C.