Minneapolis to Sioux Falls

Sunday morning finds us on Canterbury Race Track.  The "Rise and Shine" events are always fun; they feed us well (usually the second breakfast for me after I have an earlier one consisting of Martha's home-made granola, brought all the way from Highlands and still in good supply) and we have an opportunity to catch up with the friends we have met along the way and share our experiences.  "That was a beautiful drive yesterday, wasn't it?"     

Race horses are warming up on the track, little jockeys crouched over these beautiful thoroughbreds, taking them through their paces.

 
We pass through St. Paul on the way out of the city and it reminds me of the Fitzgerald Theater and all the "Prairie Home Companion" shows I have listened to for so many years.  I have formed a picture of this part of the country from those shows that is of course mostly fictional.  I read about Garrison Keillor's final show there in February (he has retired at the age of 73), and an interview he gave at the time.  "It was a good long run," he said.  When they asked him about looking back, he said, "Oh, I won't think back at all.  I'm thinking entirely forward.  It's dangerous to think back.  It's really all about work; there's no point in looking back until you can't work.  And people who can't work, they do look back.  That's how it is."  

In no time at all we are in gorgeous Minnesota countryside heading west, pretty little farms with corn and soy beans laid out in tidy rows.  There seems to be a lot of space out here - it is the land of 10,000 lakes, after all - and there are little stretches of prairie now between the crops.  Windmills are common throughout the west and we come upon many of them now, slowly turning in the prevailing winds.  Islands of trees out in the fields shelter farmhouses from wind and weather, but the rest of the land is taken over entirely with farming.

We find later that we somehow missed the statue of the Jolly Green Giant somewhere near the Le Sueur pea canning facility.  Then we are in South Dakota and Sioux Falls, a spacious and clean city, easy to navigate.  We discover the Sioux River Falls Park, a lovely little place, and there we have a leisurely picnic lunch. 

This is our first view of the exposed rock formations we will see everywhere in the American West, especially in Arizona and New Mexico.  So wide and flat and dry, and such a big sky all around.