So my neighbor calls me Saturday morning and asks me to go on an adventure. She also had invited another neighbor on her adventure west. Shockingly, both of us said yes with 45 minutes notice…grabbed our kids and left.

Here’s the back of the van after our travels…. back country gravel roads are very dry and dusty right now.

We drove about 2 hours west of here to her sisters farm. They were having an anniversary party and it’s always “the more, the merrier” for their huge family.

Shortly after we got there it was decided that a few of us should go visit a brand new winery about 5 miles away….more gravel roads…

I sampled this wine and decide to buy a bottle so Mr. G could enjoy it as well since he was off on his own adventure for the day in another direction.  It’s called Rockin’ Coyote after all the coyote in the area that come out to serinade each night.

All the kids had a blast running and jumping across round bails of hay that were neatly set in rows. There were a few mis-steps but no injuries…only laughs.

After the eating and running off the calories we went on a hayride.

A whole gaggle of kids and a handful of adults hopped on a hayrack behind this tractor driven by the eldest son of our hosts.

It honestly was the longest hayride I’ve ever been on…..

We travelled around a “section”….

Later we found out a “section” is about a 5 mile fun but dusty trip….

We saw lots of crops…some horses…and the MN River Valley just below this farm.

My 90-some yr old uncle lives about 12 miles upriver of here. Such a beautiful area….

On the way home I wanted to drive through the town my dad spent his early years in. I thought I’d be able to pick out my Grandpa’s church without a doubt.
Time has really aged it. It was kind of sad.
I didn’t even stop to take a picture myself because I was so sure I must be mistaken.
I was the last baby my Grandpa ever baptized…and also his last grandchild. I have the baptizmal bowl from the fount that we all were baptized from. It’s one of my treasures.

Here’s a photo I found on Flickr from 2009.

All in all it was a fun spur of the moment 250 mile roundtrip adventure!!! I wish we had time to do more since we were in that “neck of the woods”…or prairie as the case may have been but there is always next time….

Over the past couple weeks our family tried to squeeze as much time out of what was left of summer as possible. We ended up doing and seeing things that we hadn’t ever as a family even though they are right around the cities. Stay-cationing, I believe is the hip term for that these days.
I’ll only highlight a few…

The kids and I helped herd these sheep at a working farm that’s part of the local park system. It was quite funny…we were just there for a walk and to buy some produce and eggs when they asked if we could help. When do city kids get the chance to do something like that?!?

We stopped by beautiful Minnehaha Falls Park on our way to a museum one Saturday. Neither of us had been there since we were kids ourselves. It’s so beautiful that we have it on our list to see once more of the leaves start to change.

After a walk around the falls area we went to a one of a kind military museum that is sadly scheduled to close at the end of the month.   It really awesome to walk around all of those old vehicles…peek inside…

Of course, I took hundreds of pictures of a multitude of subjects in a multitude of other places but I won’t bore you with them all.  I just wanted to say hello and that I’m back online…no thanks to our cable company who kept me offline for 5 days longer than I expected.  GRRR!

Next time I’ll show you some new art…