Day 8: Laura Ingalls Wilder Tour

We toured Ingalls family sites in De Smet, SD, including the house that Pa built, the school that Laura attended, the Ingalls homestead near Silver Lake, and many family graves. During the tour, Willa's first loose tooth fell out in an original house where Laura lived! She was SO excited. The girls had a great time reenacting what life would have been like for Laura, seeing where she lived, and running around under the Cottonwood trees that Pa planted!

 

It was amazing learning about one horrible winter where they lived only on bread. They ground the wheat in these coffee mills. They ran out of fuel to burn so they burned straw knots. They barely survived.

Laura and Carrie attended school in this building!

We also visited the Ingalls Museum in Walnut Grove, MN, and the site of their dugout at Plum Creek. 

 This is Ma and Pa Ingalls.

Then we drove home! On this trip, we saw license plates from 35 states, plus Washington D.C. and three Canadian provinces. The girls collected the following stuffed animals: horse, buffalo, baby mountain lion, and mammoth.

Jia's favorite part of the trip was staying at our cabin. Willa's favorite things were losing her tooth in Laura's house and seeing the buffalo next to our cabin. I'm so glad they got to experience nature up close and that they enjoyed it so much!

Day 7: Campfire breakfast and Lovey!

Today was about packing up and leaving Blue Bell. Two deer stopped by in the morning to say good-bye.

We had a campfire breakfast before we left. We made biscuits over the fire, sprayed them with butter and sprinkled cinnamon and sugar on them. Yum!

We stopped briefly at Wall, which is now much more than a drug store, and then arrived at our hotel in Murdo to pick up Willa's penguin lovey. Lovey accidentally spent the trip there. Willa was glad to be reunited! Then we drove to our hotel in De Smet, SD, went swimming, and made plans for our Laura Ingalls Wilder tour the following day.

Day 6: Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary and Mammoth Site

We rose very early and drove to the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary in Hot Springs. It is a non-profit group that maintains 11,000 acres as a preserve for wild horses that would often otherwise be slaughtered. We watched a documentary called Running Free: The Life of Dayton O. Hyde about the amazing founder of the organization, and it spurred our interest in seeing the sanctuary. We signed up for the two-hour bus tour as it is a main source of revenue for the sanctuary. Although the tour was clearly adult-focused, the girls didn’t complain (much) and were excited to see all the wild horses! We also stopped to see 2,000 year old rock carvings, movie settings, swallow nests, and white peacocks. 

  

Afterwards, we visited the Mammoth Site. About 60 mammoths are in the process of being excavated at this site. It was a sinkhole and claimed the lives of these mammoths about 26,000 years ago. They were all male mammoths; three are Woolly and the rest are the huge Columbian mammoths (an African elephant could walk underneath one of them)! We toured the site and then the girls took a Junior Paleontologist class where they learned how to properly excavate using replicas. They found a rib bone and a tooth!

Willa is pretending to be scared of the short-faced bear (they found a skull of one at the dig site as well). They were huge!

For dinner, we roasted veggies and chicken dogs over the fire, and made s’mores for dessert. Then we played hide and seek and limbo with glow sticks.