Little Road Trip on the Prairie

I have loved Little House on the Prairie for most of my life ever since my dad read me all the books when I was little and ever since I started watching the show every afternoon. To this day, the TV show is my favorite TV show of all-time--and if you've gleaned anything from reading my blog entries about how many TV shows I have watched and watch, that's saying a lot. It's no surprise then that many years ago, when I stumbled upon a Little House on the Prairie Guide Book, I immediately bought it and decided that one day, I would go to all the places in which Laura Ingalls Wilder ever lived. And that's exactly what I did this summer.

Several months ago, I convinced my friend Amanda that we needed to do take a LHOTP road trip, so we started planning. The idea was to fly to Minneapolis and then rent a car to take us to Wisconsin, back to Minnesota, South Dakota, Kansas, Missouri, and then back home. The Ingalls family took 3 months to get just from Wisconsin to Kansas back in 1870; we would do the whole trip in a week.

I decided to keep a journal on the trip so that I could keep track of all the exciting things we saw and did on the way. That was before I realized that there's not much that's exciting about driving through Minnesota. Or South Dakota. Or Nebraska. Unless you like corn...a lot.

Here are some of the most exciting sample entries from my journal, copied verbatim:

"We are in the Pepin Motel in Pepin, Wisconsin. Correction: we are the only people in the Pepin Motel in Pepin, Wisconsin."

"The highlight of today was the deep fried cheese curds we ate at the only restaurant in Pepin."

"We drove 3 hours to Mankato and tried to find interesting activities to do. We failed. Then we drove to Sleepy Eye."

"Our car stalled tonight in Walnut Grove. If the car dies tomorrow on some back road in South Dakota and we still don't have cell phone reception, I hope someone finds our bodies before the vultures get to us."

"Drove to Omaha through Iowa, only to discover that Iowa is mostly under water. Then we had dinner at Red Lobster."

On the plus side, though, the actual LHOTP parts of the trip were awesome! Sure, some places had only replica cabins and signs marking the original homestead sites, but in places like Walnut Grove, DeSmet (in SD), and Mansfield (in MO), we saw original props from the TV show, original houses built by Pa and Almanzo, Pa's fiddle, Laura's correspondence with her sisters and Ma and Pa, the family's graves, etc. And Amanda and I were very proud of the fact that by the end of the trip we'd driven through 12 states, a feeling that was slightly tarnished by the $164 we were forced to spend in Kentucky when Amanda got pulled over for speeding. But as Clark W. Griswold would say, it's all part of the experience.

By the way, life back in the 1860's-1890's was hard. For instance, when Charles Ingalls' entire wheat crop was destroyed by a plague of grasshoppers in 1874 (I think), he walked--yes, walked--200 miles to find work to save his family. Then his next crop was also destroyed by grasshoppers. Then Mary went blind. Then Pa moved the whole family to De Smet, SD, only to get there the year that saw some of the worst snowstorms in history sweep across the prairie. The Ingalls family went through a lot and survived it; that's particularly impressive when I think about how the day it was 109 degrees in Independence, KS, and AAA erroneously sent us down a gravel path to a dead end, if it hadn't been for a snack-size DQ M&M Blizzard, I might have died. So yeah, it's pretty safe to say I would not have survived in LHOTP days--too much nature, not enough comfort--but I'm really glad Laura Ingalls Wilder did and that she wrote about it.