Saturday, May 12, 2007

Lewis and Clark Road Trips Book Wins a 2006 Midwest Independent Publishers Award

We took a road trip up to St Paul, Minnesota from Omaha, Nebraska to attend the Midwest Independent Publishers Association’s 2006 Book Awards event on May 9-10th. Lewis and Clark Road Trips won a second place award in the Recreation/Travel/Sports category. We were a runner up to a running book, Minnesota Running Trails: Dirt, Gravel, Rocks & Roots by Kate Havelin, which is truly a very fine book. There were more entries than ever before, and of higher quality, according to the MIPA organizers. Browsing the books, I was pleased to be included. We enjoyed the awards ceremony which was held in the beautiful Minnesota Humanities Commission building in St  Paul. It was interesting, funny and to the point. We hope to come back.

I had another reason to attend the event: I wanted to visit Grove City, Minnesota on Highway 12, 75 miles west of Minneapolis, where I spent half a year living with my grandparents when I was seven years old. So I will recount the rest of our road trip adventures.

            

First of all, we discovered one of the best interstate rest area exhibits I have ever seen, located in Adair County, Iowa on Interstate 35. It is dedicated to the memory of Henry A. Wallace, Vice President of the United States and Secretary of Agriculture under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His Farmer magazine motto was "Good Farming, Clear Thinking, Right Living." The photo shows the columns recording the loss of top soil in Adair County from 14.5 inches in 1850 to 5.5 inches in 2000. I guess we need to pay more attention to this motto. Henry Wallace’s grandfather, the Reverend Henry Wallace, founded the magazine. His father, Henry, was also U. S. Secretary of Agriculture during the Harding and Coolidge administrations.

Next we stopped at Darwin, Minnesota where there is a museum dedicated to "The World’s Largest Ball of Twine Made by One Man." It was created by Francis A. Johnson, who was the son of U. S. Senator Magnus Johnson. The ball of twine is on exhibit in a glassed gazebo; it weighs 8.7 tons, is 11 feet high, and measures about 40 feet around. Darwin is located in Meeker County, east of Grove City. I don’t know if it is named for Charles Darwin.

Grove City now has a population of 609. I had been intending to take a photo of the most beautiful sight we saw while traveling in Minnesota, the lines of lilac bushes in full bloom. All along the interstates in Minneapolis-St Paul we saw these beautiful rows of red purple lilac bushes. It turns out to be a Minnesota landmark. The don’t believe in planting one or two lilac bushes in Minnesota, they plant a row. So here is a photo of lilac bushes with the new Grove City water tower in the background.

Our final destination was the Pipestone National Monument in southwestern Minnesota near Sioux Falls, South Dakota; but because this is a destination in Lewis and Clark Road Trips I will blog about it separately.

Posted by Kira Gale on 05/12/2007 at 08:49 AM

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