Our two week trip was “wunnerful, wunnerful!”

Our last day of travelling was all about seeing the countryside by using the backroads of South Dakota and North Dakota until we got on the Interstate the last two hours of our trip.  We would not have seen Strausburg, North Dakota after leaving the state capitol of Pierre, South Dakota if we had taken the high(way) road. BTW, Pierre is the only capitol that does not have an Interstate running through it, it had the steamboat river traffic on the Missouri River when the state of South Dakota entered the Union in 1889.

The fact that we stopped off at Lawrence Welk’s birthplace just west of Strausburg does not mean we were great fans of his.  However, he was faithfully watched on t.v. every Saturday night by my Norwegian grandparents’ generation who had lived about 150 miles north of Strausburg.  Turns out that Lawrence Welk’s parents were immigrants in the late 1800s to North Dakota from the region close to Odessa, Ukraine.  These immigrants are known by researchers as “Germans from Russia” which is a misnomer really since they were actually from Ukraine.  Lawrence had many brothers and sisters and worked hard on the farm, they insisted he practice his accordian in the hayloft of the barn instead of in their small house.  On Welk’s 21st birthday he left the farm in Strausburg to start into show biz with his love of music.  He was known for saying “wunnerful, wunnerful” because English was his second language, German was his first.  Lawrence Welk died in 1992 but his legacy lives on in the refurbishing of his birthplace. He wanted to make sure visitors would know more about his parents’ sacrifices when they left Ukraine and built up a farmstead on the soil of North Dakota than about him and his brand of music.