Welcome to Days 5 and 6 of my LauraPalooza Trip, Sunday, July 15, and Monday, July 16 2012. Official LauraPalooza ended on Saturday, but my trip continued until Monday. Many Laura fans add an additional Laura site or two to the conference trip while they are at it. Since there is so much prep work getting ready for LauraPalooza, I like to save any homesite visits, if I can manage the extra time at all, until after the conference, but many more attendees than I thought seem to have added a trip before the conference on the way.

OK since this covers two days, it really should have been at least two videos, but I didn’t take enough footage of De Smet. In fact, I originally meant to leave bright and early Monday morning, but as so often happens when I visit De Smet, I kept finding more things that I just HAD to do before I left and I got so busy doing them, that I didn’t take all the video I should have. I didn’t get on the road until about noon. As it was it was such a flying visit that I didn’t get around to visiting and doing everything that I normally like to do when I visit, but I had a good time anyway and I hope you will too.

Since they seem to have gotten special press permission to film inside places they normally don’t let you. I’m adding this short video from three years ago to give you a fuller idea of what there is to see in De Smet in a nice, quick highlight video, even though for some odd reason they (the kid hosts) insist on mispronouncing it De Schmidt and they are wrong, the De Smet Pageant grounds are next to the Ingalls Homestead, but they are two separate organizations and in fact the pageant predates the homestead by a couple of decades. So the the De Smet pageant does not actually sit on the Ingalls Homestead, but otherwise it’s pretty well done for type of thing.

Sarah S. Uthoff blogs at TrundleBed Tales; look for her on Twitter and YouTube and Blog Talk Radio
Laura Ingalls Wilder Legacy and Research Association, Vice-President and Membership Chair