46, 47, 48 ...

State number 46 was MINNESOTA, but not really, we were just driving through to get to real state number 46 WISCONSIN! State of cheese! In Wisconsin we went to St. Croix National Scenic River. It was extremely scenic with a colorful array of wildflowers. I did the Junior Ranger program and we explored the river a bit - not enough. We really needed to bring our own canoe or kayaks and spend a few days, but there were mosquitoes the size of mini-coopers! It was so bad that layers and layers of mosquito repellant couldn't hold them off and we are still scratching! Wisconsin, beautiful, but itchy.

State number 47 was MINNESOTA! Really this time (I am not allowed to say I have been somewhere unless I have actually gotten out of the car and done something special or unique to the place - my mom's rule). We went to the International Wolf Center, in Ely. It was superbly, supremely the best thing ever! I adopted a wolf and am now the proud sponsor of Maya, the only female ambassador wolf. She joins my other adoptive friends, Smaug, the Komodo dragon and a baby sea turtle from Padre Island (they don't have names - I would have named it Shelby. Anyhow, the wolves were beautiful. When we arrived there were no wolves about, but soon after that it was snack time! The keepers started chucking hunks of frozen meat wildly all over the place and the wolves came running then! We saw four wolves scrambling around after meatsicles. Some pieces fell in the pond and Maya's brother, Grizzer, dove in after them. The other wolves just watched him like he was crazy. At first I couldn't decide who to adopt; the swimming had me favoring Grizzer, but then Maya made the decision for me by leaping onto her den and putting on a lovely howling performance! We all had a wonderful time and you can track the ambassador pack and learn all about wolves at http://www.wolf.org/ .

Next it was number 48, NORTH DAKOTA! We visited Teddy Roosevelt National Park. The park is spectacular. There are tons of beautiful wildflowers and weird, bare badlands peaks all mixed together and it all looks amazing. We had a perfect day and saw huge prairie dog towns! I bought a prairie dog shirt, bookmark and sticker. They are fabulously cute. It was so much fun watching them play, eat, bark, keep watch and roll around. Next we saw a wild horse. We were amazed because there are only 85 in the whole park. We were even more amazed later when we saw herds of 10 or 11 wild horses two or three more times. There were several babies. They like to roll on the grounbd and we even saw one drinking milk from his mother! Also amazing to see were the buffalo! We never found the whole herd, but we found two lone males. They were right on the road and we drove right past them! I did the Junior Ranger program here too. The last exciting thing for today (I hope) was the tornado we had at dinner. We were sitting at a restaurant and some girl came in talking about this tornado that had just touched down in the next town when one of the people she was talking to looked out the window and said, "You mean that tornado, out there?" Everyone ran out of the restaurant to look and yes, we could just see the white funnel retreating into the sky.