Home School Park Day

We had a great turnout for our first park day. The weather was beautiful, the children played and we moms got to chat!

Picnic, Woodpecker and Mushrooms

After hking in the Waterfall we enjoyed a picnic. While we were eating a woodpecker was enjoying his lunch also. While I was chasing Baby I noticed the stone building we have passed on every visit to this park has a door into an interpretive center on the back! There were pictures of the park's early years, a display of the different types of grasses on the prairie and lots of things to touch!

Since the water level

was low and still, we were able to walk where we normally can't go and even explored a cave we can usually only look at.

Tarzan and Jane found a

grapevine, however they were disappointed I would not let them swing out over the waterfall.

Minneopa State Park

We had an errand to run in Mankato, so we packed a lunch and visited Minneopa after our errand. There was only a trickle of water going over the falls. The leaves were just beginning to turn and fall.

Also residing

in the bookstore were a cat or two, a couple of bantam chickens, a lizard and a tarantula. The ceiling was cut and painted to look like the sky. Some of the book choices were not on our reading lists, but I also found books from the Sleeping Bear Press that I usually have to order online. And there was a used book shelf where all the choices were one price, several of those jumped into my shopping basket.

Our last stop of the day

was Wild Rumpus, an independent children's bookstore. My friend A had found this and visited with her children after their visit to our home. She used her GPS system and had no trouble finding it, I relied on Mapquest and we nearly gave up. A disclaimer: I often use Mapquest with success. There was a purple child sized door in the regular door, I even entered through it. In the bathroom when the light was on the vanity mirror appeared to be typical, but when the light was off there was a fishtank! In the scary book section there was a window into a rat cage below the floor.

Once the water level had dropped to meet the

downriver level the gates opened and the boat left the lock. The man we spoke with said summer weekends were pretty busy with pleasure craft but there were still barges that used the lock as well. He said there was a barge that went through twice each day, once downriver and once upriver. If we plan to visit the lock again I will call and find out the aproximate time the barge travels through the lock. I recall visiting a lock and dam on the St. Lawrence Seaway in NY. The boys remembered seeing the much smaller lock and dam on the Cape Fear River in NC.

We all agreed that the only thing that would have

made our trip to the Lock and Dam #1 better was to see a boat go through the lock. And as we were walking to the car we saw a pleasure boat approaching the lock. The pictures are not in the right order, I don't know how to do that! First the boat approached the wall in front of the lock and made a phone call, then the stoplight turned green, they entered the clock and the upriver gate closed. The captain of the boat held onto a rope and the water started to leave the lock, we could see it churning outside the downriver gate of the lock. It was amazing to see the water leave so fast and all by gravity.

Speaking of power,

the boys were impressed with the horsepower on the rescue boats, each had two 75 horsepower engines. One belonged to the Army Corp of Engineers and one belonged to the Sheriff Department. The man we spoke with, said either boat could be in the water, engine running in less than 5 minutes from the phone call. Upstream from the dam was a warning buoy, downstream we could see old bridge footings.

Scenes from the Lock and Dam

The red mechanism is the part that once opened the gate, they have replaced it with a new one. We saw herons and egrets. The Lock was in the flight path of the Minneapolis airport and we saw several planes taking off. The hydroelectric plant on the other half of the river supplied power to the Ford plant.