Twenty Three Hours of Adventure

Saturday morning at The Guardian.

On Friday afternoon, Karyl and I packed the car up and headed southwest.  I recently read about the Jeffers Petroglyphs in southwestern Minnesota and we decided it might be a fun adventure.  As you drive from the cities toward the southwest, the trees fall away to fields of corn and soybeans.  We had dinner in Mankato at Summers 4 Grill - which was fine.  At about eight p.m. we pulled into Windom, Minnesota and The Guardian Motel.  The most unique feature of this establishment was that each room came with its own garage.  You enter your room from the garage.  Most unusual.

Feed & Quilt

On Saturday we hit Jack Slade's World Famous Steak House for breakfast.   The coffee was weak and the potato pancakes I had were funky...quite the aftertaste.  Before heading out to the petroglyphs we saw this quilt shop and had to stop.  The owner was gearing up for the Crazy Quilt Tour which was the following weekend.  Bus loads of quilters go from town to town and have a good time.  The left side of the structure was a feed store and the quilt part was jammed into the back on the right.  Very cozy.

Wilder, Minnesota - Where Breck School started.

Karyl mentioned that Wilder, Minnesota was only eight miles away, and we should go check it out since that was the city were Breck School got its start.  I sneezed and missed Wilder on the first try, but we doubled back and found the "town" which had no buildings other than homes--and not many of those.  Here is the sign that shows where Breck .
After Wilder we headed back to Windom and we noticed smoke billowing up from the center of town.  We investigated and found the fire department and neighbors standing around watching an old house burn down.  Someone told us that they didn't hear any sirens, which let us to conclude that this was a planned event.  Seems an odd way to get rid of an old house, but maybe that is the best/cheapest way to go.

Finally, after the fire we ventured up highway 71 and despite a few bad directions from our Google map app - we found the petroglyphs.  Unfortunately, as we arrived for our visit, so did a passing shower, which made our stay a lot shorter than we had wanted.  The walk from the visitor center out to the ridge of rock that Native Americans used to carve thousands of images was only a couple of hundred yards.  We timed our arrival perfectly to catch the 10:30 a.m. tour, which helped show us many images that I am sure we would have missed on our own.

The stick points near the head of a big Thunderbird.

The images range from "Thunderbirds" to handprints, to animals, to atlalts and drawings of buffalo.  Some of the etchings were more faint than others, but they were lots of them.  It would have been cool to tour the site with a college professor or someone who knew a bit more about what we were looking at, but it was impressive.

Thunderbird in upper left, moose or buffalo calf in middle.
Horses were not here yet.

Building with Tree Sculpture

Finally, we head back home and stopped in New Ulm for lunch.  New Ulm was a center for German settlement way back when.  So we stopped at the Veigel's Kaiserhoff for a German flavored lunch.  After eating way too much food we wandered up and down the main drag. There were a lot of handsome brick buildings.  Here are a couple.

Brick Building from 1890....Wow!