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More than a decade before Laura Ingalls played on the banks of Plum Creek, and 70 years before the fictional Kit Kittredge
solved mysteries in Ohio, a girl named Caroline "Caddie'' Woodhouse roamed the Wisconsin wilderness.
To many readers, Caddie was the first and best American Girl.
She came of age during the Civil War and loved the outdoors, gathering hazelnuts in the woods, dodging rattlesnakes on the bluff and poling a log raft on the lake.
First, we loved the water slides, geysers and whimsical fiberglass figures at the Polynesian’s Water Factory.
Then, we loved the bigger slides, chutes, lily-pad walk and tubing river at Great Wolf’s Spirit Mountain. When the Wilderness opened Klondike Kavern, its second park, we loved its indoor-outdoor hot tub and the long tube slides there and at Treasure Island.
An arms race was only beginning, as Wisconsin Dells hotels expanded on a good idea — fill rooms year-round by offering indoor water parks.
If it wasn't for the climate, Peter Pan would feel right at home in Madison, Wis.
It's the NeverNeverland of the Midwest, a town whose zany exuberance is appreciated by everyone but Republicans, whose
outnumbered governor once called it "57 square miles surrounded by reality.''
Inhabited largely by college students whose political zealotry is matched only by their zeal for a party, downtown Madison is a place where it's easy to get in touch with your inner child.
My niece loves a big Rottweiler named Rza, so her travel opportunities are limited.
But one October, I rented a lake house near Cable, Wis., that allowed dogs, and both of them came. And we all had a great time: When Rza's happy, everyone's happy.
"This is probably the best weekend of her life,'' said my niece, after we’d spent the day romping on the lawn and in the nearby forest.
Laura Ingalls Wilder, who once said, "At the time, I had no idea I was writing history,'' would be very surprised to find that the eight books she wrote about the Midwestern frontier of the 1870s and 1880s have become the basis of a well-beaten tourist path.
To a log cabin in Wisconsin they come, and to Laura's farmhouse in Missouri. They track down a depression above the banks of a Minnesota creek, and a shanty on the Kansas prairie. These starry-eyed fans are the Deadheads of the preteen set, traveling with their equally avid mothers and sometimes grandmothers, who pass on a love for the "Little House'' books like a cherished heirloom.
Sadie DeJong of Arizona City, Ariz., brought the books home from the one-room schoolhouse she attended on the North Dakota prairie; her Dutch-born mother, read them, too, learning English by deciphering Laura's tales of sleigh rides and fiddle music by the fire — and of grasshopper plagues and deadly blizzards.
It's morning in the Little Town on the Prairie, and we're thumbing through the guest book at the Prairie House Manor B&B.
"I can't believe we are in the 'Little Town' where Laura grew up,'' one woman writes. "This is truly a dream come true,'' writes another.
So many little girls, so many dreams. When Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her nine books about growing up on the American frontier of the 1870s and 1880s, she had no idea her idealized portrait of pioneer life would be such powerful medicine to so many.
Mansfield, Mo., has never been a particularly prosperous town. Lying in the heart of the Ozarks, its landscape is bucolic but barely fertile.
In 1894, however, a stream of people seeking better lives was flowing through this Gem City of the Ozarks, and among them was 27-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had traveled in a horse-drawn hack from De Smet, S.D., with her husband, Almanzo, and their daughter, Rose.
As a child, Laura had zigzagged across the Midwest with her family, dogged by failure. Her life with Almanzo seemed similarly
destined: Two years after they married, their barn barned. The next year, they contracted diphtheria, and Almanzo suffered a
stroke that crippled him for life.
In Duluth, you can lead a child to water — but just try leading her away.
“Mom, it’d be worth moving to Duluth just so we could go to this beach a lot,’’ said my daughter Madeleine, jumping from rock to rock at Brighton Beach.
Duluth, once the ugly duckling of Lake Superior, now is one of the best places in Minnesota to take children. On Canal Park,
the lineup of tourist attractions can keep a family entertained for days. There’s the Great Lakes Aquarium, an Omnimax
theater, a skating and bicycle path, a castle-style wooden playground, a giant ore boat to go through and freighters to watch
going under the Aerial Lift Bridge. There are tour boats to ride around the harbor and, nearby, a railroad depot with trains to
ride along the lake.
To a would-be tour guide, Chicago is as shifty as a kaleidoscope.
The city has so many facets, in so many splendid configurations, that no one can predict what anyone will like best. Especially to a child.
During spring break, my friend Rebecca and I took our children to Chicago, with an itinerary that cunningly alternated visits to museums with visits to zoos and parks. Pitting high culture against popular culture, we knew what the biggest hits would be: the Ferris wheel, the zoo, the elevated train, deep-dish pizza, perhaps the Museum of Science and Industry.
There’s one city in the Midwest that never will get too big for its lederhosen.
Milwaukee, sometimes called the biggest small town in America, doesn’t brag — though it should. It has a swell baseball stadium, an art museum that’s making waves in architecture circles and a rejuvenated riverfront.
Lake Michigan borders downtown, lined with beaches, bike trails and playing fields. Craft breweries and restaurants reflect a culture steeped in Gemütlichkeit, the German term for congeniality and good life.
As soon as we turned off the highway into Nisswa, my children’s heads began to swivel.
"Souvenirs . . . Gift Shop . . . Moccasins,’’ read 9-year-old Madeleine. "And look — Candy Store.’’
"This is a cute town,’’ said 6-year-old Peter, noticing the covered sidewalks. "It’s like a cowboy town.’’
It's no secret there's buried treasure right here in Minnesota.
It's in every gravel pit, along every railroad track, on every beach. All you have to do is look to find a Lake Superior agate, Minnesota's official state gemstone.
And every July, agates also can be found spread over Moose Lake's main street — 350 pounds of them, some even polished, hidden along with 1,200 quarters in 4 tons of rock.
Long before settlers plodded into the Upper Midwest, its rivers and forests were swarming with a more footloose kind of entrepreneur.
The Pilgrims still were getting a toehold on the eastern seaboard when Frenchman Jean Nicollet passed through the Straits of Mackinac on his way to Green Bay, returning to Montreal with news of a vast interior filled with fur-bearing animals.
Traders wasted no time going after the pelts, and international commerce already was brisk by the time people in Salem, Mass., were whipping themselves into a frenzy over imagined witchcraft.
When I was a child, I had a wild imagination. Anything would fire it up, especially tales of exploration: in dank, twisting caves; along rushing creeks shadowed by stone bluffs; on sun-kissed hilltops, with the world stretching out all around.
And I loved the tales told by two real-life children’s-book heroines: the resourceful tomboy Caddie Woodlawn, who roamed the wilderness of western Wisconsin during the Civil War, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, who relished life in the Big Woods above Lake Pepin before they became farmland.
Western Wisconsin, it seems, has fired many young imaginations. One September, I took my own two children there, on a 185-mile tour with six spots that appeal particularly to kids.
In my family, we take care of ourselves. In fact, my ancestors not only didn’t have servants, they were servants.
So when I finally went to a full-service lake resort one summer, I felt a little like an imposter.
Luckily, that only lasted about 10 minutes.
It was a beautiful fall weekend in Lanesboro, and the streets of this picturesque town in Minnesota’s bluff country were packed with sightseers and bicycle tourists.
They were browsing in gift shops. They were sampling at the winery. They were bicycling on the Root River State Trail.
In fall, Lanesboro is the darling of day-trippers and weekenders. My children and I love it, too. They spent 15 minutes with me in Cornucopia Art Gallery, I spent 15 minutes with them in the Indian crafts shop, and then we went in-line skating on the paved trail, across the trestle bridge and along the limestone bluffs.
In the circus, nothing succeeds like excess. And no one succeeded at that more than the Ringling brothers.
In the last half of the 19th century, Americans clamored to be amazed. Tent shows traversed the countryside; Wisconsin alone
had more than 100.
On the Mississippi, showboats brought entertainment to river towns. In 1869, two circuses — one was Dan Rice’s Own Circus, whose proprietor’s clown character was the inspiration for Uncle Sam — put on performances in the Iowa river town of McGregor. They enthralled the 17-year-old son of a poor German harness maker.
Up north, there's a lake cabin with my name on it.
I don't own it, and I never will. But for a week in July, it's mine.
Only a generation ago, most middle-class folks in this area could think of nothing better than renting a little housekeeping cabin on a lake.
When it comes to travel, it costs a lot less to make kids happy than parents think.
Oh, kids are happy to let adults spend money on big-ticket trips — Disney World, Six Flags, the Wisconsin Dells.
But what do they prefer? It's elemental, my dear parents: rocks, water and sand.
In the wilds of northeast Wisconsin, winter always looks like winter.
It's the kind with snow — snow that comes early, stays late and blankets the forest in heaps, supplying reliable skiing and snowshoeing to people from less-blessed locales.
But in 2003, the heaps of snow didn't come there or virtually anywhere, and skiers were desperate. So was Pete Moline, who runs Afterglow Resort on a lake near the Michigan border. With no snow, he had no skiers and no livelihood. Then, he decided if snow wouldn't cover his trails, he'd bring it there himself.
Over the years, my children have logged many crossings of the St. Croix River.
Like all who are young at heart, we love traveling in Wisconsin. Not only is it beautiful, but it also tends to produce people who remember how much fun it was to be a kid — Laura Ingalls Wilder and Caddie Woodlawn, whose adventures were recounted in famous children's books; the Ringling brothers, whose fledgling spectacles in Baraboo grew into the world's biggest circus; and Tommy Bartlett, whose water-ski thrill show helped turn the Wisconsin Dells into Kid Central. Thanks to them, it's really fun to be a kid in Wisconsin.
When they were younger, my children were thrilled by the Big Top Circus, the water parks in the Dells, the vintage-train rides out of Osceola.