Visiting the World’s Largest Buffalo

I grew up visiting The Buffalo in Jamestown, ND.  I went with my parents.  I went with my Grandma Edna.  I went with my Grandma Jan and Great Aunt Carol (which was one of my favorite days) and one time I went there on a school field trip.  However, none of my kidlets had actually ever been there before, because whenever we are driving past Jamestown, we are almost always in a hurry.  Last week I decided to stop on our way from Valley City to Pettibone.  We timed the stop perfectly to fit in between thunderstorms.

The kidlets really enjoyed themselves.  We didn’t have a chance to explore everything before the second deluge of rain began, but we hit some of the most important landmarks.

I remember hugging the buffalo’s legs myself. 

This was The Banana’s expression when she looked up and realized that the buffalo stature was, well, anatomically correct.  

We splurged and put a quarter in the binoculars.

It’s fun to watch your own offspring play at specific places that you have extremely vivid memories of experiencing as a child.  I totally remember climbing all over this stagecoach.

There was a jail just like this one in the back room at the  old fire hall in Pettibone.  I was absolutely terrified of it as a child.  Someone must have jokingly told me I’d get locked up in it if I were bad, and I utterly believed them.  I tried hard to be good whenever I saw the fire hall.  I was so scared of that jail that when my mom would give me money to walk down Main Street to the grocery store to purchase candy with my cousins, I would actually cross the street to the other side and walk a block on the opposite side of the street so that no one could come out of the fire hall and grab me and lock me up.

The kidlets were not afraid of the jail.  We had a great time looking in all the frontier buildings and exploring all the sights.