20060820 - Minnesota

8/20 This week we drove from Wisconsin Dells to Minnesota and then spent some time in Austin, Minnesota (the SPAM capitol of the USA, Home to the Hormel SPAM Museum). Austin is near the twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. It is also near the Mall of America, a large Mall with an indoor amusement park. We thought we were very near both, however we were almost 150 miles away. We drove to the Mall and spent an afternoon walking around the Mall and the amusement park, but we did not drive into the cities. Turns out we are both getting a little burned out on city touring. Rich is ready for a home base and a familiar town (I think traveling in new spaces where you don’t know where anything is and a huge vehicle behind you is wearing him down) and I am ready for more space and regular routines. We are ready to move into the house.



(Good news, we got an EMAIL this afternoon from our agent in Tucson with a picture of the house. It is framed!)



The amusement park was interesting. Very noisy. I never realized how much noise the machinery associated with rides is. Plus the place was full of kids. And the roof just bounced the sound down. The shopping center (at least the part we saw), however, was not that interesting. My favorite type of shop is one where the owner either creates or selects the merchandise personally based on their or their customers' tastes. That is one of the reasons I like small quilt shops not national fabric shops. I like a shop that has it’s own personality. Unfortunately for me, almost all of the shops in the Mall of America were part of large chains.
The roads we traveled on in Minnesota were full of ice heaves (at least that’s what I thought they were). We’d be driving along and then Bam, Bam, Bam, Bam, Bam. I kept thinking that we were destroying the inside of the cabinets in the RV. In Alaska the dirt roads caused the upper kitchen cabinet shelves to fall into the lower cabinet. Turns out it was not that bad, no destroyed cabinets at all. Thank goodness!
The campground we stayed in, in Austin had a storm shelter. I had never seen one of those in a park before. It was a building that had an opening that looked like a big cave. I remembered how I felt when I saw all the trees down near our site in Sturgeon Falls. I think it would have been nice to have somewhere sturdy to go to when all those trees were coming down. We never went into the shelter although I would have liked to see what it looked like inside.
The last 2 days we have been traveling 600 miles from Minnesota to South Dakota. We are now in Hill City which is near Mount Rushmore. While we were driving I was remembering the first time we came here. Rich and I met training for VISTA at Columbia School of Social Work in New York City in 1968. After 6 weeks training I was sent to East Orange, New Jersey to work in Outreach with the local YMCA. During training Rich had been working with an Agency in Harlem. As part of his training he participated in a demonstration with the agency and 5 other trainees and they were all arrested. Their trial had not happened by the end of training so they stayed in New York after most of the rest of us left. Eventually they were acquitted and Rich was sent to work in Pittsburgh. There he was assigned to work with the Urban League. Eventually we got engaged, and got married in East Orange in April, 1969. We finished out our year's service in East Orange in August and drove back to California. Rich was scheduled to begin Law School in San Francisco in September so we were in a bit of a hurry to get back but we decided to see some of the country on the way. We were driving a VW bug and we were camping - I still remember sleeping in the (very full) bug when it rained. One of the places we decided to see was Mount Rushmore. On the way across the country the VW’s starter died. We did not have time or money to have it fixed. So we were parking on hills and popping the clutch to start the car or leaving the car running. What I remember most about Mount Rushmore is leaving the car running while we went to look at it.