Once upon a time, there was a girl who grew up in a tiny little town in North Dakota. (She’ll laugh at all of you who think your towns of 5,000 or 10,000 or 15,000 people are “small,” as her hometown had a mere 76 residents, all of whom she could list on a map of the village if asked.)
She went off to college, not too far from home, and then traveled far across the Midwest to Indiana for a year of graduate school. While in the Hoosier state, she explored such interesting places as Columbus and Nashville and Story and Broadripple. After she completed her degree, she became a school librarian in Iowa, which is really much nicer than most non-Iowans make it out to be.
While in Iowa, she found interesting places to visit as well. The outlet mall in Williamsburg, which although perhaps not so interesting, was at least a novelty for her. The tulip festival in Pella. Sabula and Savannah and Galena, Illinois. An art gallery in Maquoketa and the art museum in Davenport and the ice cream parlor in Wilton, all of these were places that she traveled. Her school friends would just shake their heads on Monday mornings when they asked where she’d been on her solo travels, for many of them had never been to these places, even though they’d lived there for many years. (They also recommended that she get a cell phone, which not everyone had in those days, but they were good friends who looked out for her, and they worried lest something should happen to her while on the road.)
Then one day she drove to Minnesota for a wedding, a family wedding, her cousin’s wedding. And there, among the brothers who were groomsmen, she found one who would dance with her. They danced the night away, and soon her weekend travels were to Minnesota instead, where he lived, and now with a companion she went to such places as the Harkin Store and the Renaissance Festival and Hermann the German.
Sometimes he would come to Iowa as well, and she would pull him along on adventures to the Amish and antique stores in Kalona and wine-tasting in the Amana Colonies and the Old Broom Factory in Cedar Falls.
Soon he decided that too many miles were being put onto their vehicles, and he proposed. She gladly accepted, and they were married in the church in that tiny little town in North Dakota. The population of the town grew five-fold that day as friends and family celebrated with them, and the cousin whose wedding she had attended a year earlier was now her sister-in-law.
They had decided to honeymoon in a secret location, somewhere neither of them had been before. (Always practical, they had left sealed envelopes with their parents to be opened only in case of emergency.) Making their way through Bemidji and Brainerd and Anoka to the airport in Minneapolis, they flew off into the East, landing in Boston and then heading north. They had booked one of the most romantic hotels they could find, in the small town of Jackson, New Hampshire, and yes, even she considered that town to be small. Here they saw the local sights, waterfalls and woods with no mosquitoes and old men in the mountains and the windiest place on earth, as if she’d never known wind on those prairies of North Dakota.
They continued their journey east, to Bar Harbor, Maine, where again they found a beautiful romantic place to stay, with a beautiful romantic restaurant and unique little shops and ice cream stands and a tour of an island spelled “Desert” but pronounced “dessert.”
When their allotted time had come to an end, they headed back to the airport, taking the back roads as much as possible, because the traffic on the interstate was heavy, but mostly because taking the back roads was what they both liked to do.
And so it was that they arrived back in Minnesota and set up their home in a farmhouse on a little hill, where she could look out and see for at least a few miles, for as beautiful as the East was with its trees and mountains and oceans it was the wide-open spaces that she still liked best. She learned to adapt to a new way of life, where “harvest” meant soybeans and corn in September and October instead of wheat and barley in August, and where her new small town had almost 1000 people.
A few years later, new little adventurers began to enter their life, one by one, four in five years, but she didn’t really let that slow her down. She found that it was marvelous to take these little ones out into the world, following the back roads, learning about new things, and watching the wonder in their eyes as they saw trees and prairies and great lakes and tall buildings. She took them to some of the places she and her husband had been to in their early life together, some ten years ago, and found that some things were better remembered, but others were more treasured when experienced with children.
And so it was that she began to write about these travels, with these little ones, and Travels with Children was born.
She hopes you’ve enjoyed taking the journey with her.
