We were excited to wake up at beautiful Lake Thompson. This is the lake where Laura and Almanzo took their Sunday drives, the vast lake that drenches this prairie and gives the animals a drink, the lake that gives life and joy to this day. So many sounds and creatures!
This was my view when I opened my eyes.
Ticks. All over the tent. I’m going to kill myself. I hear the kids outside, “Mom, there are ticks on us!” Did we die and go to hell? That’s so unlikely, but what other explanation can there be for this? I hit the tick off the tent, 3 more crawl up. The kids are yelling that they can’t keep ticks off of them. I bravely venture forth to rescue my children. Maybe I should just run to the car and leave EVERYTHING here, kids and all? I hate ticks. The tent is covered with them. They haven’t figured out that we are no longer in there. Blood thirsty little demons. They are crawling up my legs and I cant stomp them off fast enough. I decided not to abandon the kids, and i yell to them to get the bedding and shake it out as well as they can. The ticks have burrowed into our fuzzy blankets! I might have said a few sailor-type words, called those things appropriate names. We picked out all the ticks we could see, smashed everything but the tent into the car, meticulous organization be damned, and I threw the kids into their seats. We were all safely in the car, away from those vial offenders. Except the tent….that is our house. There isn’t a place to buy another except for hours out of our way. I dashed back to the tent to save our dwelling. I figured I could tie it to the top of the car and let the ticks fly off all over the highway. It would serve them right! I got to the tent, my legt covered in ticks, saw the tent covered in ticks, brushed my legs clean, and slid to safety inside, zipper shut. Now for knocking all these ticks off. Except they had decided it would be an excellent idea to crawl into the stitching of the netting and get as stuck as possible. These little dudes were out for blood in a big way. To hell with it. Captain is abandoning ship. I know when I’m beat. They can have that tent if they want it so badly!
we left the tock there and reserved a hotel room tonight right then and there.
I hate ticks.
Onward to better things! Like breakfast. We haven’t eaten out for breakfast since Brandon went back home. And he would have loved the diner we found. I loved that the positive reviews included a praise for soup on cold days. The life here is raw and real. People here battle ticks and snow. They must be tough as Buffalo hide, but their hearts are brilliant gold! Speaking of tough guys with hearts of gold, today is a day when we missed our Popcakes!!!
Our last pioneer/Little House day, and we are packing in three days worth of experience into one day. No biggie.
We started off at the site of Laura and Almanzo’s homestead. This is where they lived after they were married. Beautiful land.
De Smet has the Pioneer educational activities nailed. The visitors center was a collection of historic buildings that had been brought from their original locations and restored as historical treasures.
The town salvaged The Surveyor’s House and hired a perky old-maid type to stand inside and give more information than one imagined one could have about the house. But she was pleasant to listen to. This was a real house, possibly the largest house Laura lived in up to this point in her life. It felt like the little old house I lived in for the first few years of my life – very old and small, but roomy. They knew how to optimize space back then! The bedroom fit a larger bed, which Ma and Pa must have appreciated, Pa could finally lay flat without his toes touching the opposite bedroom wall! Good thing they were so short back then! Laura and Mary and Carrie slept upstairs in real beds. They even had a dresser for their things!
The town also salvaged several of the school houses where Laura would have attended or taught school. She was only 16 or 17 years old when she had her own school. Kids like her not only taught all grades, they also had to make wise decisions regarding whether or mot to let the kids walk home in storms. How many made the wrong choice and doomed every last child and themselves to a freezing end, their mistake discovered only after the snow melted enough for the evidence to show through. The harshness of life at that time cannot be imagined in modern times.
Pioneers mainly journeyed by covered wagon, but as time went by, and the railroad pushed through, there were more jobs and better transportation, so towns like De Smet flourished for a time. It seems the people still flourish in their souls, even if the towns are financially bereaved.
On our tour of pioneer buildings, we visited the house Pa built for Ma in town, the final house for the Ingalls family. Laura was married by the time this house was built, but it was satisfying-to see that after the 10 or more years of hardship, danger, and working to make a better life for his girls, Pa succeeded. Ma lived out her days in moderate comfort from this point on, and this house provided a place to live and an income for the Ingalls girls and for Rose Wilder at one time or another. That Charles Ingalls. I would like to have known him. Friend to Native Americans in a world when the saying was “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” peacemaker among his peers, gave his wife and girls respect, confidence, and a voice in a time when women were property, a man who knew Scripture and lived it, charitable, doting husband and father, optimistic to a fault…a soul that I believe will wake and stand before the throne of God and find a kindred spirit…like King David.
Something about facing the simplicity of the dishes overwhelmed me. The proper value of a useful, yet beautiful item, is inestimable.
After following the lives of these pioneer icons for the past 3 days, walking where they walked, feeling the spaces they felt, it was fitting that we visit the place where many of their bodies turned to dust. “Lives well lived” kept repeating itself in my head. Something to strive for. Appropriately seize and occupy every single moment we are given, and attend to what it means to do so. 
Our final stop is the Ingalls’ final homestead they farmed while in De Smet. On our way, we passed the Big Slough and Silver Lake. The lake has been drained, but appears to have filled back up. This is a land where lakes (and accompanying ticks near some) are determined to spread and shimmer as they reflect the heavens. 
The Ingalls homestead is now owned by a family that has created a holistic pioneer life experience for campers and visitors alike. we encountered no ticks here. We will camp here next time. And there will be a next time. This place is a destination unto its own.
Here, they re-created as many ways of pioneer living as possible, and everything was hands-on. 
And Kittens for everyone! Let’s hope nobody gets ringworm this time. Or flesh-eating bacteria, for that matter. 
They even have a well for kids to pump water from!
And, of course, the Little House TV show house replica. Here, the kids learned how to make braid rugs, how to do laundry on the prairie, and how to make pioneer “fidget spinners.” These were a button on a looped string that can be spun like a yo-yo. It took a few tries, but the kids soon found that they could master this fun game. It took far more skill than a fidget spinner! 
Then there was that Free Range mom moment when I couldn’t find my 6-year-old, but was pretty sure he was making his own adventures. He had wandered to the carriage house, stood in line, and hitched a turn riding the pony and driving the pony cart. At least I was pretty sure that dark kid in the red shirt way out there was my caboose kid. The gypsy lifestyle forces kids to be independent thinkers. 
They all got a turn, not only on the pony and cart, but driving the covered wagon to the schoolhouse! 
Here we learned what a day in the life of a pioneer school kid was like, what they learned, who their teachers were, and what happened to them when they misbehaved. Naughty Miss Bunny got to spend time with her nose on an X on the chalk board, but all of the kids did well in the spelling Bee. When we got home from school, we made the long walk to church, just like the pioneer families would have done on Sundays. This church was saved from demolition, brought to this farm, and refurbished for American children to visit and learn from. My kids enacted a very tedious liturgical service and forced their parishioners to sit still without mentioning that if we wanted to visit the workshop and prairie shanty, we would have to cut to the benediction and hastily ring the church bell. My kids have a unique love for church and churches.
And can you blame them? They have only ever known church as family and peacefulness. I sat wondering about this church. It was simple and beautiful, and it was going to be torn down until it was savedq. So how many other churches like this are available for saving? Where can we get one? I wonder if our priest would appreciate a church like this. Maybe our humble church building is perfect, though. There is something divinely holy about a space built by God’s people to worship Him. You can’t import that kind of workmanship. 
we didn’t miss the long walk to the homesteaders bunkhouse shanty, and we didn’t miss the workshop. There we learned how to sharpen knives, how to make rope, and how to use the corn husker without getting fingers chopped off, and how to make corncob dolls from the resulting corn husks.
This was a very successful day. Take that, ticks! You can’t get us down!
Well, I checked the weather, and there were severe lightning storms predicted, so a hotel is a smart choice no matter what.
Knowing weather is important in the gypsy life. Lightning can easily turn into a tornado, or severe wind. It can rain so hard that you cannot see the road. Sometimes it’s best to find a place to pull over and wait it out. But all we encountered was moderate rain, and relentless lightning hitting the ground all around us for three hours on our drive. No big deal. My children were in awe and terrified. Sometimes the lightning was so thick that I could see as if it were day. I could see the clouds to the south and over our heads. No tornadoes or wispy clouds, although the misty mass in the sky was solid and determined. The drive was calm and brilliant.
When we arrived at the hotel, there was a line of hopeful guests looking for a room. A pale man was begging for a room. H is wife was sitting in the car frozen in fear. She had screamed and cried the entirety of their two-hour drive. They had driven the southerly rout on the 90 freeway, the wind was so strong that the rain fell horizontally. There was a severe tornado warning on that rout. No room at the hotel meant all those hopeful and terrified drivers lay dripping on couches around the lobby while those of is with pre-paid rooms got our keys and headed to a dry bed. Should we give the terrified woman and her husband one of our beds? I got my kids out of the car and we ran through the lightning into the building to the warm quiet room. The woman and man would need to find their own peace. Our room hardly fit 3 people.
I am thinking about those ticks out there on Lake Thompson. They are not worried about lightning or tornado warnings. They have likely lost interest in our tent without our bodies to feed on.
What an amazing day. This is our song for today. So high on existence in this space at this time right now. Coldplay, Hymn For The Weekend
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