Lindbergh State Park and Historic Site

This weekend was supposed to be a camping with Noelle and Parker weekend, but unfortunately Noelle got sick with sinusitis and so my adventure for the weekend would be a solo one. I decided to stick with our original plan of visiting Lindbergh State Park and then heading down to Lake Maria and grabbing one of the backpacking sites for the night. And so early this morning I packed up the car and headed southwest through McGregor and Brainerd to Little Falls, Minnesota and Lindbergh State Park.

Since I was alone and without a dog, I decided to tour Charles Lindbergh's boyhood home.

It was actually mostly a summer home for the Lindberghs and the tour was interesting. Charles Lindbergh, aside from being the first pilot to fly across the Atlantic Ocean was an interesting character and in the latter years of his life even turned into quite the conservationist. The house and its surrounding farmland were donated by Charles Lindbergh in honor of his father, a US Senator. The donation was made partly to protect the home from souvenir hunters who, after the flight from New York to Paris, started to tear the house apart to grab a piece of the home where the famous aviator spent some formidable years of his life.

Among the interesting things we were shown on the tour was a door which Lindbergh had shot a hole into, the kitchen floor where he split firewood into kindling (and in the process marked the floor up a bit), and the "Moo Pond" he built and signed his name in the wet concrete.

After my tour I decided to check out the surrounding state park and of course hike the Hiking Club Trail. It was a short hike of 2.5 miles, but passed some interesting sites along the way including an interesting water tower built by the CCC,

and the site where Charles landed his first plane "Jenny".

Among the natural features were many wildflowers in bloom

 and many dragonflies flitting about.

A few sections of the trail ran paralleled the pretty Pike Creek over which a young Charles built an interesting, rickety-looking suspension bridge as a boy. Luckily that bridge has been replaced with a more substantial one.

By the end of the end of the hike I was glad it was over though. Not because I was tired or the scenery was boring, but because of the thick mosquitoes.