Laying low in Minnesota

8/28 - 9/4/2019 - Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin  to Welcome, Minnesota (288 miles) 7 nights at Checker RV Park, $155.50 for the week.

We stayed the week in Welcome, MN, only a few miles from the Iowa border, to wait out the Labor Day weekend.  It’s a small park, surrounded by, surprise, corn fields, alternating with soy beans.  The days were cool and the nights were downright chilly for this Texas girl.

Bill is a huge fan of the Little House on the Prairie TV series and we were only an hour and a half from Walnut Grove.  So we took a lovely drive through the corn fields and farms to the tiny town.  Really all that’s there is the railroad, a restaurant called Nellies, which doesn’t look at all like the one on the show, a post office, bank and the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum.

Now, I’m not as familiar with the show.  I watched it when I was a kid, but Bill used to watch it while eating lunch, when I was teaching. I thought I might read the books to get caught up, and just couldn’t get through Little House in the Big Woods.  So I did some research and found that Pa moved his family, a lot!  They lived on “the prairie” in Kansas in the early 1870s when Laura was very young.  They moved to Plum Creek and lived in a dirt dugout home near Walnut Grove in the mid-1870s.  After three years of  crop failure, they moved again in the late 1870s to De Smet, South Dakota.  That’s as far as I got.  I love that so many young girls cut their teeth on these books that are based on Laura’s life, and are essentially early reader historical fiction - my favorite genre.

We’ve gotten to where we like Pick Your Own places, and Bill really wanted to pick some corn - because it was all around us.  Now, being from Texas,  you don’t trespass because you might get shot.  So Bill found Timberlake orchard that had just opened for the season the day before. When we visited, they didn’t have a lot of apples yet, so we asked the owner if he had any corn to pick.  He did!  He walked with us and answered all our city slicker questions.  Here’s what we found.  Corn and soy beans are not just grown for human consumption, like vegetable oil, edemame and corn flakes.  Over 50% is sold to foreign countries.  Lots of corn is used to feed livestock.  Lots of both are used for biofuel.  There was a Valero plant just across the road that filled never-ending train tankards that ran all hours of the day and night (what is it with RV parks and railroads!).  BTW- like the cherries in Door County, everything is about two weeks late coming in.  The farmers were waiting for a few more warm days before they harvested.

I love that our country is not all concrete and glass and some places are still in tune with the earth and the seasons.  These are the things you don’t see when you live in urban areas.  For this stop, I’m using my farmers market find as my regional foods.  Here’s a look at what we got from the bounty of Minnesota.