MINNESOTA AND WISCONSIN

Finally leaving Wyoming, we buzzed through South Dakota to Minnesota where we stayed at a Sioux-owned casino RV park that was very nice. We had stopped to see Zoe’s grandson who is in the graduate school of international business at the U of Minn. It was exciting to hear him describe his program and to see how much he has matured in just a month in the program. There are 96 students in his first year program, about half of them foreign students and about 20% women. Some Chinese students help him keep up his Chinese language skills.

Next it was on to Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. We had heard so much about the area, we wanted to see it for ourselves. The town is an overblown Disney World with theme parks everywhere and huge hotels with theme parks also. Once out of town though, we took two boat tours of the Upper and Lower Dells that were beautiful. Hundreds of acres have been preserved in their natural state with no buildings allowed on them. They surround the Wisconsin River and the reservoir, Lake Delton. The soft Cambrian era sandstone rocks beside the water were carved in fantastic shapes by an ancient frozen glacial lake that suddenly thawed and broke free.

We were in our favorite place, boat tours. I thought two young foreign women in front of us on the cruise sounded like they were speaking a Balkan language. Sure enough, they were from Bulgaria where we are going in less than a month. The world gets smaller and smaller.