As a child I loved the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I still do. In fact, I'm cofounder of a website dedicated to her life and literature. But had I suggested to my born-contrarian daughter, Sky, age 8, that she read the stories, she wouldn't have touched a single one.So I simply left them on her bookshelf. She ended up sailing through the series, and she was thrilled when my husband, Matt, and I decided to take her and our son, Wilder, 5, on a four-day trip to some of the places Laura lived in and wrote about. Sky even went all-out prairie girl, packing her sunbonnet and her calico dress with matching pinafore.
We planned our pilgrimage to start at Laura's Wisconsin birthplace and move west, as she did, with stops in Minnesota and South Dakota. Early on a Thursday in July, we flew from our Kansas home to the Minneapolis airport (the closest one to Pepin,Wisconsin), hitched up our rented covered wagon (read: minivan), and headed out to Laura's frontier.
