It's interesting but I find that instead of having a big "travelogue" of what I've done in my mind, there are small individual things that stick out and that I remember from trips.

Just some things I saw or did while traveling...

Winona, Minnesota (that's where my meetings were) is a fairly nice small city. I have to say I envy the residents there the amount of moisture they have in the summer - many of the people who lived in the area around campus (where front yards were very small, like 10' by 20') had turned their whole front yard into a flower garden. And there were lots of petunias and impatiens, neither of which I've had much luck with here (mainly because I don't like having to water constantly). I know they pay for their nice summers during the winter, but it was a real relief to be somewhere where 85* was considered unusually hot, and where it got down into the low 50s at night.

I walked around the town a lot (I didn't have a car; I went up on the train). I arrived a day too early - I was following the "standard" NAPC schedule where meetings started on Monday. So I spent Monday walking around town. I went to their three museums - they have a historical museum, a Polish heritage museum (it was an area heavily settled by people from Silesia and Kashubia), and the Watkins museum (yes, that Watkins - the vanilla people). I think my favorite was the Polish museum, even though (as I explained to the docent, a bit to her dismay I think) I don't have any Polish heritage at all.

I found the museum interesting, I think, because they had some of the "everyday" stuff - the embroidered linens the women did, photographs of the little civic baseball teams that every town seemed to once have, descriptions of how people worked and lived.

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I crossed the Mississippi six times this trip. I think that's a new record for me. Two times over and back to visit my folks, two times over and back to Winona from Illinois, and then twice in the field trip day at the meetings.

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The town where my parents live has a small dairy operation where they make cheese (I think they started out raising Jersey cattle and branched out into the cheesemaking). I love little things like that - small businesses where the people do something they love that serves a need in the community (it is very good cheese). They have their operation set up so you can go and observe the cheese being made (and can buy it directly from them). This year they also had a small "zoo" of farm animals (I think for people who bring kids). The biggest attraction was that they had a pen of the Jersey calves that were "friendly" and would let people pet them. (They also had a turkey but the sign indicated he wasn't so friendly. And they had llamas in the barn but there was no information suggesting you were welcome to walk up to them so I didn't).

It's sort of a silly thing but it is fun to be able to scratch a calf's ears. And Jersey calves are very pretty animals, with their big dark eyes and their caramel-colored coats.

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Coming back from my meetings through Wisconsin, I saw large fields of cabbages. That was an interesting change from the corn and the soybeans you usually see in the Midwest.