Little Falls

I think we left Lake Itasca State Park at just the right time. Yesterday the temperature was in the mid 60s and this morning it was 26 degrees and the weather forecast is for snow tomorrow. In a campground with almost 300 sites, there was only one other camper last night. The stars were beautiful in a clear sky with a background of fir trees.

It was an odd sensation to have an entire campground to ourselves.

The road, highway #10, down to the Twin Cities paralleled a railroad track. At one point there was this train with new tank cars which looked like a segmented worm or millipede. 

Minnesota farms are big and flat. The closer we got to Minneapolis the warmer it got. By the time we arrived at our campground it was 74 degrees.

Our big adventure for the day was a stop in Little Falls, Minnesota, the birthplace of Charles Lindberg and where I spent four years in high school. Little Falls is just about half way between Lake Itasca and Minneapolis and we arrived around11:30 am.

This is at the Charles Lindberg State Park in Little Falls. The park buildings were constructed by the WPA, not the CCC.  This structure is a water tower that, until 1964, supplied all the water to the park. 

This is Charles Lindberg's childhood home.  I hope you can just make out the Mississippi River through the trees to the right of the house.

The train station in Little Falls where I used to arrive to go to school after the holidays. It is now the Chamber of Commerce building.

The movie theater in Little Falls notable for where I first saw the movie Ben Hur.

Adjacent to the high school is a parking lot. When I was here for high school this was an open field and the fire department used to flood it in the winter for ice skating. The third floor, on the top, is where all the rooms and dorms were.

The building on the right is the Chapel and there is now a new main entrance where these two

buildings connect.

St. Francis greeting all who come to visit.

This is our Chapel, the nuns side. The students used a smaller are on the right which is now a "gathering" area.

This is the old library room on the second floor where I first worked in a library. It is now a conference room. The other classrooms on the second floor are now used for a Continuing Education program.

Up on the third floor is the old bathroom that looks remarkably the same as when I used it.

The second floor still has the piano practice rooms and one with an organ. I took piano lessons three years and organ for one.

The swimming pool in the basement is still very much in use, only now, on the right, is a hot tub. 

The main entrance to the High School with beautiful maple tree that still has its leaves.