"My Crazy Kids"

  A train ride from history By Allan Olson Well my vacation has been over for nearly a month already and after four weeks and my third column I will share my final few days of our six day family vacation to South Dakota. It was Friday morning our last day in South Dakota before we started making our way north again and on the agenda was Custer State Park and the 1880 Train. In truth while we talked about Custer State Park it was a little bit of a last minute plan. We decided that since we didn’t have to be at the train station until 1:15 p.m. we should take a drive through Custer on the way to the Hill City to catch the train. We got to the park, asked where we would see some critters and were directed to a road with the majority of bison on it. As we were driving we started to see a few bison and then a large herd of them. We were driving through the park taking pictures of the some of the bison and pulling off on some of the scenic overlooks for some phot...

Birthday Weekend By Allan Olson I know I promised to wrap up my family vacation in this week’s column but a milestone occurs this week in our lives and is just too important to not mention so those looking to read the rest of the vacation details hang on and I will finish it up soon. This weekend was all fun but the proceeding that was work. Monday evening Nikolai kept bugging me about mowing the yard and I finally conceded to let him mow the hayfield that was becoming our yard. I selected an area and a path for him to follow and he worked on that section of the yard. After supper I worked on more of the yard and my finished the yard later in the week. The kids raked the heavy grass into the sled and then hauled into the part of the yard that doesn’t get mowed on Wednesday or one of those days that I wasn’t home – all of this not just because it needed done but because we were having a birthday party on Sunday. The weekend began Friday evening as we did some m...

 Vacation in South Dakota and more! By Allan Olson Oh boy, where to start when writing about six days jam-packed full of vacation fun! (Last week I wrote about our adventures on Day Six in Ludlow, SD.) I guess I will start with Day One. We left our hotel in Fargo after continental breakfast; I found one geocache that morning just beyond the hotel parking lot! We headed for the gas station and were out of town by about 7:30 a.m. Our destination was Hermosa, SD, where we had reservations for the next four nights. That day we made stops in Ellendale, ND, where my brother and his wife lived and attended college for several years, and in Aberdeen, SD, where they also lived, and where we made a long-anticipated visit to Storybook Land. We were cruising along what I call the back roads of North Dakota at a clip faster than I like to drive (but apparently you are still legally allowed to) and were approaching Ellendale when we spotted a fighter plane on display nex...

Don't judge a book by it's cover! By Allan Olson Ludlow, SD (Pop. 6, at least until we arrived.) – I’m going to start the report with a story about a little town we happened upon five days into our vacation, near the end of a fun six days. It was official; our journey across South Dakota was coming to an end. As we left our little cabin at a campground in Hermosa, SD about 16 miles south of Rapid City, our destination was the North Dakota Badlands in Medora. We ventured out about 7:30 a.m. from and headed off toward Rapid City in search of donuts and coffee. With a town that big and a GPS, it shouldn’t be that hard, right? In all honesty, the donuts were an afterthought. My brother decided he needed coffee, so his wife plugged “Starbucks” into the GPS and sent a message to my wife that we were heading to get coffee – I was definitely fine with that. The search for coffee was easy; my wife suggested that I grab some donuts, too – I had already thoug...