Red Wing

My husband and I just returned from a trip to Red Wing. It the first time we've visited the town and it was a wonderful trip. We were the only guests at the Bed & Breakfast where we stayed (the advantage of going on weekdays) so it was like having our own private mansion. I highly recommend a midweek off-season trip as a way to truly relax and reconnect with each other. It's more private when there are few tourists and it's cheaper, so you feel less guilty about spending money frivolously. We used our tax refund and decided that was our economic stimulus package (and we paid it ourselves, instead of sending the bill to our children - take that, Washington.). Spend a few days in small city within a hundred miles of your home: rent a room, eat out, drink, shop, consider it your patriotic duty.

We stayed at the Moondance Inn, which was marvelous. It was built in 1874 and still has the original woodwork and the Steuben & Tiffany lights. The hosts were very warm and friendly and non-cloying. Also, every room has a private bath & whirlpool. I'm very big on that feature. Hostels sounded fine at twenty, but by forty a room with a private bath is far more important than a cheap room. Or is that just me? There's a great porch, with plenty of comfy seating, but the only picture I took of it has my husband in it, and he values his privacy. And I value his happiness and peace-of-mind, so you have to go to their website for pictures.


If you go to Red Wing, be sure to climb the bluff, it's worth the sweat. Red Wing has a hill at the east end of downtown called Barn Bluff. It rises 350 feet above Main St (which it actually interrupts) and provides an awesome view of the Mississippi islands and Lake Pepin. Having read the Little House books as a girl and later reading them to my own children, I insisted on driving around the lake. My husband was a good sport, he even stopped at several historic markers. Poor guy, he's never been big on that sort of thing, and Lake Pepin has a lot of markers. I think he was relieved that we have no relatives buried in Goodhue County, otherwise I'd have dragged him to cemeteries, too. He really doesn't get the appeal of a cemetery as a tourism hotspot, of course, he's not into genealogy either.

Genealogy Tip of the Day: Go gravehunting! Anytime you travel, search your family tree for burial sites in the county (or counties) to which you are headed. I suggest entering the cemetery name in the burial site, as well as town, county & state. It makes planning grave hunting trips easier. If your software won't let you search for a detail like every "burial site that contains Goodhue County" you need better software. Reunion is great for searching, it allows locations Reverse Place name sorting, which starts after the last comma (i.e. country, state, county, city). When you are in a cemtery, look around. The people buried near ancestor may be relatives - especially in older cemeteries. If you have a digital camera, it costs nothing to take a few dozen extra pictures. Shot at least two tombstones extra in each direction. Trust me, this will be worth it. I knew Mary Lester grew up and married Louis Barger - if I had looked two tombstones from from her mother Margaret Holland Lester Beecher, I'd have found her on my first trip to St Thomas Cemetery in Jessenland. It would have saved me a return trip.

Yom HaShoah

Today is Yom HaShoah, the Day of Holocaust Remembrance. It seems quite fitting that Irena Sendler's story was just shown on TV two nights ago. Irena was a Catholic social worker in Warsaw, who saw what was happening when the Nazi's forced the Jews into the Ghetto. She couldn't ignore it. She couldn't pretend it didn't concern her. Irena smuggled two-thousand five-hundred children out of the ghetto. This is remarkable even without considering the fact helping Jews was a capital offense. She knew there were children she could help, so she did. Irena never considered herself a heroine. She did not glory in the children she saved, rather, she mourned those she could not save.

Irena was a far better Christian than most of us today. She was concerned with right and wrong, good and evil. She was not concerned with tolerance. She knew the Nazi's were evil and did not care what their reason was. How many of us look at the world through the rose-colored glasses of tolerance? It is not right to let Ahmadinejad give an anti-Semitic speech at a conference on race. Israel has every right to exist. The Holocaust must never be forgotten nor downplayed. We cannot, in the name of tolerance, allow his intolerance. The West must let Iran know that we won't let them destroy Israel. Let us all participate in Yom HaShoah by recognizing the hateful anti-Semitism of Ahmadinejab and his cronies. Let us stand up for evil. We need to be more than deeply disappointed, we need to be outraged.