Southern Minnesota

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We traveled through Southern Minnesota on our way to Wisconsin to visit some friends of Bonnie. We stayed out in the country by Blooming Prairie north of Austin. Austin is the home of the Spam Museum which we visited and found more varieties of Spam than I ever expected. We also went up to Owatonna in a crazy rain storm to visit the Orphanage Museum. The Orphanage was at one time the 3rd largest in the US. In the 1938 it housed 500 children and had 100 staff. As I was walking through the museum, a man said to me, "Can you believe we walked in here and saw our grandfather in this picture right here?" His grandfather had been sent to the orphanage along with several siblings after his mother and two siblings had died from small pox and his father wasn't able to take care of the children. It was interesting to listen to him and his brothers talk about stories they had heard growing up.

As we crossed from Minnesota into Wisconsin I got my first glimpse of the Mississippi River. There were lots of islands in the area where the freeway crossed it but finally we got a view of the main channel of the Mighty River flowing on to the south. Hopefully I will get to see it again when we take in some of the states further South.

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