Up early in Springfield, MN, this morning we gathered ourselves up and went for a stroll around town. Came across a beautiful mural without any hint of graffiti. I don’t know if kids are just this good in Springfield or if they’ve been threatened with death, but it’s working.

The town buried a time capsule in 1981. We explained what that is to the kids, but trying to make a kid understand that nearly everything that they see around them today will be vastly different a hundred years from now is like trying to explain to them that it’ll take two weeks to get to Grammy’s house. The passage of time is a difficult concept.

You know you are well out in the country when the paint store has a bridal registry.

Getting the kids new cameras was a good idea. The new ones are the perfect size, light, bright, and have huge buttons. And they take good quality pics to boot. Lowe has shown a lot of interest. As we drive I often here, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, as he rattles off countless pictures of the same thing in quick succession. Which he may get from me.

We skipped breakfast in Springfield and drove down the road to Walnut Grove expecting to eat at Nellie’s Cafe. Sort of a tradition when passing this way. It really shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise when we pulled up and found a sign saying they were closed—today only—for a medical reason.

At the Laura Ingalls Wilder museum we asked if there was anywhere else to get some breakfast.

“Hmm, lets see. Well there is the Bar and Grill on Main Street, but they don’t open for breakfast. Hmm. Down in Tracy they have a Subway. Ohhh, what else? The gas station?”

Okay, so we’d be skipping breakfast and would instead start the day off with lunch in Pipestone an hour away.

The museum was about what you’d expect. A cute little place with quite a few displays set up showing what things were like in the early days of Walnut Grove’s settlement. The Little House on the Prairie stuff was nostalgic much like a museum for the Dukes of Hazzard would be for me. There were calendars from 1978 with Michael Landon on the cover, TV Guide magazines from the 70s and 80s, snapshots from on the set, scale models of the television town made out of toothpicks, and even a pair of panty hose worn by the actor who played Nellie when she visited Walnut Grove in 1992. Yikes. Actually, that part of the museum was a little sad. I didn’t learn a whole lot about the actual Laura Ingals Wilder, author and pioneer. And the stuff about the show seemed to me to be the collection of an overzealous teenager.

Outside of Jasper we spotted a big Dutch windmill from Highway 23. Then we spotted a few more through the trees. We circled around on dirt roads a bit before finding our way, then parked out front of the farmer’s house. A stone path led around his property from the road. It was obviously a hobby—a labor of love. It made for a pretty beautiful view out his living room window.

We left Minnesota in the rear view, checked in to our Sioux Falls hotel, and then drove across town to Falls Park. The kids loved the place because they were free to explore. Ali and I both realized right away that this place was different than what we usually find in the States. There were no fences to keep us away from the edge, and then even more surprising, there was only one small sign back by the parking lot listing the dangers. Basically the sign said, keep an eye on your kids. Thank-you, Sioux Falls for letting people use their own common sense for a change.

These two similar shots of the Falls were taken with two different cameras. First one is with the Canon 6D, the other with the Fuji X100T. The X100T is set to the Classic Chrome film simulation. I like both, and couldn’t choose one over the other. Point being that I’m very happy with the new Fuji, as well as our DSLR.