P: Woke up at 6:30 am, uggggggg. At breakfast I had a bagel.
T: We had breakfast at a rude people place [Panera]
P: We got in the car and I drew and drew and drew. I drew birds and animals and live peanuts for everyone on our tour. Our first stop at Lake Pepin, where I picked up little mayflies and let them go. We saw an eagle, swooping and gliding with its partner.
P: We went to the little house in the big woods — actual site. But not the actual house, but a replica. It was an actual replica.
T: It had nothing in it but a dust pan and a broom and picnic table. It was very very very tiny, about the size of a hotel room or a living room, whichever is smaller. There was no ladder to get up to the attic.
T: We went to a Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum. It had a lot of beautiful dresses and good quilts.
P: It had toys, toys, toys, toys.
T: We got to see what Ma’s china Shepherdess would have looked like.
P: We saw dolls of Ma, Pa, Laura, Mary, Carrie, Grace, Almanzo, and Nellie Olesen. They were realistic.
T: They were also very pretty. There were china dolls, with china arms and legs almost the size of American Girl Dolls.
P: There was a cat on the deck of the pretend steamship. But it was a plastic one.
T: There were things that Laura had there. I was impressed because she lived so long ago and they still have her things. Then we collected pebbles from the shore of Peppin Lake. I found three very pretty pebbles that I loved.
P: And then we went to the Pickle Factory for lunch.
T: We were driving along and we were following a Jeep which we thought was Barb’s car, but then we got to a market and the car was not Barb’s car. And we’d been following it for so long. And now we lost track of Barb! We all met up at a gas station. It was kind of while before everyone caught up. But we were the first to get there. Ha!
T: We went to another museum about Laura [in Burr Oak, Iowa]. We now know that Laura didn’t write about a whole time in her child books. They just lost some wheat crops. Some people who were making a new hotel said they could come and work. A little while after they started working there, Pa found out that they were paying him wrong, so they moved to a brown house with a saloon separating their house and the hotel. The saloon caught fire, and Pa said he wouldn’t move a drip of water if the whole town had burned down.
T: They moved down the street, where baby Grace was born. But that house was deconstructed before they knew the use of it. Only one brick remains from the house where Grace was born.
T: None of the people living today will be related to Laura, for their descendants died off after Rose (Laura’s daughter) had her son who died before he was married. And none of Laura’s siblings had any kids of their own.
P: We went to the cemetery. We saw lots of graves. Laura used to go on quiet walks in that cemetery to calm herself down.
T: Zach (who is on our tour), we like to play this game with him… the ground is lava. To play, you count down and someone has to jump up on something so they are not touching the ground. He also made us some coloring pages and bought us two things of colored pencils to help us color them. He’s so nice.
T: We drove to our hotel, unpacked the car and went swimming. After a little while we took showers, went to dinner, and went to bed. Goodnight.💤
[Mom: This hotel is quite nice and had a strong enough wifi to finish yesterday’s blog while the kids were swimming in the pool. I let them swim for a while before getting them back to the room to take showers. Parker claimed to be cold and hungry so we got her all taken care of before her shower.
Babe and I decided that we didn’t want to eat the complimentary burgers provided by the Quality Inn tonight. So instead, I went to Walmart to pick up some supplies and then we brought in BBQ brisket and grilled veggies from a local restaurant here in Decorah, Iowa.
We ate our delicious food and drank our screw-top wine (we are aiming sleeping tonight, thank you very much!) sitting in the dining area of the hotel while two very tired girls zoned out with the cooking show playing on TV.
We got the kids to sleep by 8:30! Go us! Another adventure-filled day!]