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Published: June 25th 2017
Spam Museum
Volunteer guides - known as Spambassadors - offer visitors small bits of Spam on a toothpick or pretzel stick, commonly known as Spamples.Geo: 43.6667, -92.9744
Yes, yes, I can now officially confirm that I am months behind in my postings but apparently it's not all that easy to purchase a condo , make move arrangements, and wrestle with a number of other never-ending issues , all while continuing our North American road trip. I was tempted to pack it in but the noisy demand from our follower convinced me to try and catch up.
And while I'm busy making confessions, I would also have to admit to the deep dark secret of liking spam (coffee, popcorn, and spam fuelled my moderately successful University campaign), so when the opportunity to visit the world's only Spam Museum (how can there be only one?) presented itself, we had to make the detour. Spam has to be the Twinkie of the meat world. DH had fond memories of watching Monty Pythons 'Spam Alot' with her dad but she was decidedly reluctant to admit to liking this magic meat substitute. It's definitely one of those food products that you don't want to know too much about- basic ingredients are pork shoulder meat, with ham meat added, salt, water, modified potato starch as a binder, sugar, and sodium nitrite as a
Corn Palace
In the late 19th Century, a number of cities on the Great Plains constructed "crop palaces" (also known as "grain palaces") to promote themselves and their products. preservative. Nutritional value is a little questionable but that stand-up guy, Joseph Stalin said that the boatloads of spam shipped to Russia kept his armies alive during WWII (and- true story- you could use the grease on your guns). The Museum walks you through the fading history of spam with special tributes to states like Hawaii that sees a higher per capita consumption than any other U.S. state. We're boycotting red meat including pork so we weren't even able to sample the spam pizza, but they did offer up a can of Turkey Spam so DH has that to look forward to during our next picnic.
Although 125,000 people visit the museum every year, I suspect that food connoisseurs like Bob and Kathy L would be thinking that a detour couldn't possibly be justified, but what if I told you that we were also able to visit one of the last remaining Corn Palaces (covered in multi-coloured corn cobs and husks), a tribute statue of The Jolly Green Giant, and DH's personal favourite- a pawn shop that has $1 million worth of one-ounce gold bars on display. Fitting that much excitement into a short distance just doesn't seem possible.
Fun Fact- Spam
Corn Palace Murals
The exterior corn murals are replaced and redesigned each year with a new theme. Emails were named for the food product (per Monty Python- horrible, ubiquitous and utterly inescapable).
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Reg Walton
non-member comment
We used to have slices of spam battered and deep fried quite regularly when I was a boy.