There should be a picture at the top of this post, showing me lecturing in my Victorian frock coat. But I didn’t think to have one taken. You’ll have to imagine it for yourself. This old photo of Boss Tweed should help.
The drive to Madison, Wisconsin runs between four and five hours, not counting gas and food breaks. That seems like a long drive to me in my old age, but I handled it. My chief concern was on-board entertainment, since the loaner I’m driving has no working stereo. I finally settled on buying an audio book from Amazon, and listening to it through earphones, on my Fire tablet. Worked OK, once I figured out how to start the reading at the beginning of the book. The Amazon people, like any good pushers, give you the first taste free, so I got a book I’d read already, Jørn Lier Horst’s Dregs. I’m glad I got a book I was familiar with, because sometimes one gets distracted (by Google Maps directions, for instance), and there’s no easy way to repeat text with your hands on the wheel. But all in all, a successful experiment.
As I mentioned last week, I’d been operating on the assumption that I was going to be lecturing on Saturday, then discovered it was really Friday. So I had to adjust my plans and rearrange my hotel reservation. That lost me any opening in the hotel where the meeting was, but I got a room just up the road. Within walking distance…. As if I was going to walk, with five cartons of books to carry, plus PowerPoint equipment.
The meeting was the Tre Lag Stevne, held every two years by a coalition of three Norwegian-American bygdelags. Bygdelags are associations of descendants from particular regions of Norway. Genealogy is one of their big activities. I’d spoken to them about Vikings, two years back in Alexandria, Minnesota.
This year the theme was the emigration period, including the Haugean evangelical movment. One of the organizers remembered that I came from Kenyon, Minnesota. He contacted me, saying he’d always been curious about the Old Stone Church, located between Kenyon and Faribault. Did I know anything about it? Indeed I did. The Old Stone Church (built around 1877) was the original building of my home congregation, Hauge Lutheran in Kenyon. On top of that, I grew up on a farm precisely 1.5 miles south of the old building. I had much to say on the subject, some of it pertinent.
Thus my lecture was outside of my usual wheelhouse, but I believe it went well. The audience was attentive, and they laughed in the right places. There were many questions afterward, and a lot of compliments. Book sales were good, but not spectacular as they were the last time I spoke to the three Lags. No real surprise there; you almost never do as well fishing the same waters a second time. But I made enough, along with my honorarium, to make a small profit on the trip – assuming I don’t price my time very high. Which I generally don’t.
On the way home, I had one very pleasant surprise. It’s my custom to eat at established franchise restaurants when traveling, purely out of timidity. I’ve had enough bad meals in small cafes to be leery of them – which, I imagine, has lost me as many good meals as bad ones over the years. But I pulled off the highway near Menomonie, thinking I’d find gas and a Culver’s at that exit. I got the gas, but it was the wrong exit for the Culvers’. So, being tired, I decided to take a chance on the café attached to the gas station. I wanted something resembling a genuine meal, not a burger and fries, so I gambled on the daily special, the fish dinner. I fully expected a couple of those sad, flat, freezer-dried planks of breaded fish you see so often in rural cafes.
Instead, what I found before me (after a wait, but you have to wait everywhere these days) was fish entirely indistinguishable from Culvers’ North Atlantic Cod. Which is high praise indeed. And the fries and cole slaw were better than Culvers, in my epicurean opinion.
I’ll give them a plug. The Exit 45 Restaurant. Tell ‘em I sent you, just to confuse them.
Then I drove home and collapsed.
This next weekend, a shorter trip, but more complicated and packing heavier. The Crow Wing Viking Festival, near Brainerd, Minnesota.
