The Mystery Cave and my Childhood Memories!

As a child growing up in Minnesota, I remember going to Mystery Cave.  As I prepared for this trip, I checked the internet to see where it was and guess what!  It was right near where we were in Lanesboro.  In fact, there was even another cave called Niagara, but when I called on them both, Mystery Cave won out, because at Niagara you had to go down many flights of stairs,  many...not a few.  I didn't know if I wanted to do that so went with the Mystery Cave, which after all was a part of my childhood memory.  I sometimes like to "revisit" my memories and see how real or accurate they are!

Well,  the cave was shown on the internet as having a detour and it looked a little hard to figure out.  As we were approaching with our car, I decided to call the Cave and see how best to get there.  The ranger that answered the phone was SO NICE!  He said he had a better way that would save us some time and miles.  He literally stayed with us on the phone till we were on the final road and we were able to get there.  He even held the tour till we got there because he knew we were coming.  He was actually the ranger that lead our tour.  He had a nice personality and it made it a very enjoyable time.













Here we are approaching the cave.

A river flows past the cave and the cave was once under the lake and glacier of this area.

Brecklyn looking at the river.

And below is the entrance to the cave:

Guess I won't be able to go after all, at least till after my diet....
So on we go, to another entrance, a bit easier for the likes of ME!

And WHAT pray-tell is this critter, a cricket???  No it's bats in the belfry!

Yikes!

Here we go, Baby!  We would go 135 feet below ground before the tour was over.

Mind you, it is 42 lovely degrees in here and we just were in 90+ outside!

The flow-rock.  We musn't touch anything!

Looking down, down and down.

Eek, what's over there?

The way out of the cave in the next picture.  Good luck gramma!

Fossils of sea critters, look carefully!

And a little lake:

And a bigger lake that sometimes floods the cave during rainy weather.  Care for a dip??

Right about now, Brecklyn is very cold.  Shorts just aren't her thing in 42 degree temp.  But we have walked about a mile and there are 12 more miles in this cave!  Luckily we won't get the "Full-tour" today!
And then out we come.  My lens was now all fogged up!!!

And back on the road we went.

It was about when we were driving past this point that Brecklyn remembered she forgot her little stuffed Minnesota moose at the cave...sob....

Laura Ingalls Wilder at Burr Oak, Iowa

 For all who went to school in Elmore, Mn, you know what I am talking about here!  In 4th grade we read Laura Ingalls Wilder books as taught in reading class by our teacher, Mrs. Dick.  We were all absolutely enthralled by her writings and the fact that she was a Minnesota pioneer.  She had several homes in the area as they moved from place to place and she wrote about all of them.  One place that she wrote about and that was not published YET! was the home in Burr Oak, Iowa.  The tour guide would say Burr Oak and I always thought she was saying "Baroque" and it took me a few minutes to figure out what she was saying.  Burr Oak didn't appear on our GPS.  It was near Decatur, Iowa.  It was in the vicinity of Lanesboro and so I wanted to take the opportunity to go there.  There was a main road leading to it called Ingalls Hwy or something like that.  Another home which we didn't visit was in Walnut Grove, Minnesota.

So we found ourselves in Burr Oak.  We were told that although Laura wrote about Burr Oak experiences in their lives, this writing was not published as a part of the children's books that are now so well known and published in  40 languages.  The reason was is because this home was in a hotel and the Ingalls family lived there and Mrs. Ingalls fed the hotel patrons and they worked there at the hotel which was situated next door to a saloon.  The stories that Laura Ingalls wrote about and expressed were not suitable for children in the part written at this location because her experiences here next to the saloon were not always the best and not some that children should be reading about.  This year this book is being published for an adult audience and is now available for pre-order.  We saw a copy of that writing in her own hand-writing, which was very nice actually.

So we started the tour in the museum part which was in the old Burr Oak Savings bank shown below:

Here is a picture of the Hotel where the Ingalls family lived and worked.  The saloon is no longer there.

Below a picture as you enter:

And a few more shots of the home:

At the pump organ, Laura would "have" to sing while a regular male patron of the hotel played.  Not her favorite thing to do, but had to anyways.

This was a short tour, fun for my memories as a Laura Ingalls fan, though and I am glad I got to visit.  I would have always felt as though I had missed it considering I was so close to it!