Spam Museum & Jellystone Park Camp-Resort, Austin, Minnesota

Anne-Marie and I arrived at the closest RV Park to Austin, Minnesota, and once we had the trailer setup, we dashed off to the Spam Museum, back in Austin.  The Museum is as much of a history of the Hormel business in Austin, as it is about Spam, the canned ham.

The Museum is in this building, and it’s much more extensive than it looks from the outside.  There is even a guard house at the driveway entrance, to direct visitors.  Many rooms with bright and well done displays.

Their Spam Shop has everything imaginable that has been labeled Spam, and lots of customers throughout, Anne-Marie is right of center, pondering a Spam T-shirt.  Another display shows the vastness of the Hormel products, and the varied preservation systems, refrigeration, freezer, canned-packaged.
 
The Spam Exam Game show, and the Monty Python display with a full run of their skit.

A restored buggy, from the time that George Hormel started the company.  The Hormel company played a large role in provisioning the troops in WWII, and one camp was named Spamville.  Their food products are sent all over the world from this and other processing plants.  We drove through a industrial area to reach the Museum, and the Hormel name is on a lot of buildings.  Anne-Marie bought one of the Bacon Spam cans, and we each got a new shirt from the Spam Store.


The banner picture is of our trailer in this RV Park, and it is a nice setting. The Jellystone Park Camp-Resort, just east of Austin, Minnesota has 350 sites, and is jam-packed  with kids, and kid stuff, and things to do for family's.  This is a picture of one part of the pool area, and waterslide.  This is a place where family’s setup camp, and the kids have free run of the whole park, fishing ponds, water tubing in the creek, hiking-biking trails.  They even have a track area for the kids to race their radio controlled vehicles.  The family next to us have six bikes in their yard, and toys, and games scattered about, and even a tent used for the boys bedroom out back of the trailer.  The boys and girls both will dash off to the pool, water-slide, and come back wet and tired, hang out for a few minutes, play a game, run to the bike rental shop and rent a low-rider trike, return the trikes and head back to the pool.  This park isn’t full but there is a flurry of activities going on all the time, a very high energy, busy RV Park, for family’s.  The price structure for the camping spaces vary a bit, $30 for a primitive site on a weekday to $90 for a all inclusive premium site on the lakeshore on a holiday, we chose the basic water/electric site with no extra activities.


The drive yesterday wasn’t as tiring as the previous day, we still had the energy to visit the Spam Museum, after setting the trailer up, and we even had dinner in a small restaurant, after the museum visit.  We fueled the van yesterday, and even with the falling gas prices, the cost of moving the trailer was 50 cents per mile. 

Today, we will be traveling to Madison, Wisconsin.