Prairie Adventure: toys and tents and eagles. and the Mississippi River.

It hasn’t even been very long yet and my days are already blending together.

That’s how travel goes I think. Off schedule and out of routine in a haphazard, purposely random fantastic kind of out of control way.

There was a toy store today.

A giant family-owned toy store with a cute bird name.

Lark.

We had given the kids a specific allotment of money prior to this trip. Each kid received the same dollar amount with instructions to spend it however they wanted but when it was gone, it was gone. (Very parental phrase to utter.)

Surprisingly, not every kid made a toy store purchase.

Piper Finn fulfilled a six-year-old dream, according to her.

She purchased a mood ring.

Phew. Now we can know what this little mysterious non-communicative first grader is thinking.

Inside the toy store was a imaginatively creative carousel.

I love the age of these kids. When a carousel is still a magical ride. When their eyes show a sweet shine to the wide world around them.

Just down the road in the next town, the National Eagle Center was located. (Man, the internet does make finding great road trip stops so much simpler.)

The eagle center is situated directly on the bank of the mighty Mississippi River.

We had been following the beautiful river for miles and miles. It’s gigantic. And really pretty.

Bergen wants badly to drink some of the Mississippi through his LifeStraw.

But back to the eagle center.

It was totally worth the stop. They have five eagles living there – all five resident eagles are flightless due to various injuries and have been rehabilitated but could not survive in the wild. We were able to stand so close to these marvelous creatures. Able to hear them make territorial calls that Kevin secretly believes he instigated. Able to watch one eagle munch through her lunch – just rip and tear right through a whole chicken, snapping bones and devouring it all in a grotesquely fascinating manner.

We learned tons of great eagle info and the center had a few cool exhibits – like testing your ability to hold a large eagle’s weight on your own arm.

And a replica eagle’s nest – nearly nine feet across! (Eagles are faithful to a nest – more faithful to a home than a partner, in many cases!). Oh – and once a bear hibernated all winter in an eagle’s nest!

After we filled our brains with eagle facts we wanted to fill our bellies with dinner in nearby Pepin.

We stopped at a restaurant that claimed to be “Pepin’s only open air restaurant”. It was just fine and met our needs, but its claim would have been more accurate if it had said “Pepin’s only open restaurant”.

Our tent is in place. And the temperature is expected to be in the low 50’s. In July.

We are ready to see Laura sightings tomorrow – starting with the beginning – the location of her birth.

I’ll leave you with this for now — Otto’s fine and appropriate for him toy purchase …. an owl. An owl he has named Otus Swoops.