Minnesota: The State that looks the same from one end to the other

Highlights: Laura Ingalls Wilder's hometown, Walnut Grove. What little girl didn't LOVE her books back in the 4th grade? We were too cheap to pay the $10 to visit the LIW museum, but we had fun perusing the gift shop;

cruising through Brett's parent's hometowns, Canby and Winona, which, from what I understand, are in the middle of absolute nowhere, connected to nothing and close to nada in every directionyet charming and sweet and full of good people. Afterall, my inlaws are from Canby and Winona and they're pretty swell. Besides, the Canby boys wrestling team were state champs in 76, 77, 79, 86, 94, 95 and 06;

fantastically terrifying thunderstorm, which, at one point, we discovered there was a severe storm warning in the exact area we were traveling and we were encouraged to pull off the road and seek shelter (we didn't). I'm still sort of recovering from the stress of the drive, as the storm went on and on and ON for, oh, a 150 miles, from MN to Wisconsin and in fact the lightening got even closer to us as we passed through La Crosse;

pelicans on one of the 10,000 lakes in Minnesota, just off Laura Ingalls Wilder Memorial Highway

So, the lightening was terrifying for me, though I silently tried to convince myself that statistically the probability of being struck while moving at 68mph in a Jetta are tremendously small (ironically, I learned later by some act of coincidence that lightening strikes the planet Earth something like 6,000 times per minute and 1,000 people are killed by lightening each year).

I'm tired.