My wife, Pam, and I, went back to the town of Tyler, Minnesota, (not to be confused with Tyler, Texas) this past weekend. It is the town we lived in for 23 years before we moved to Blue Earth 16 years ago.

It was the weekend for the city of Tyler’s summer celebration, called Aebleskiver Days. Yes, I know, that is a pretty different name for a celebration.

A little background on that for you is that Tyler is a town of Danish heritage. And, aebleskivers are basically a round Danish pancake. I know, all pancakes are round, you are thinking. Well, aebleskivers are round like a tennis ball.

The most interesting thing about them is not the taste (because, let’s face it, they taste like a pancake), but watching them being made is fascinating. They are cooked in a special aebleskiver pan, which has big dimples in it that each create one aebleskiver.

The person cooking them has to keep turning each ‘skiver in order to make the round ball. They use a knitting needle, usually, to do the turning.

At the very first Aebleskiver Days, back in the 1960s, the town served 80,000 of those round ball pancakes. Now days it is more like 20,000. You get two breakfast sausages and three aebleskivers and the price is a free will donation.

We were there because the Tyler Tribute newspaper was being honored as the Business of the Year. Our son was there because it was his 20th high school class reunion.

I ended up talking to a lot – and I mean a lot – of people over the weekend. Many of them I had not seen in a long, long time.

One person I visited with, however, kind of surprised me. You see, after talking to lots of folks from Tyler, I actually visited with someone from Blue Earth – at Aebleskiver Days.

I was walking around the festivities and was hiking through the ‘Skiver Car Show,’ as it is called, and I saw a little gray pickup.

I thought, I know someone who has a little gray pickup exactly like this – in Blue Earth. Then I thought, can there really be two of these Morris Mini-Pickups, with the steering wheel on the wrong side, in Southern Minnesota?

Mike Holland drives his little pickup around Blue Earth during the summer. And it was indeed Mike’s pickup sitting there at the car show in Tyler.

Not only that, but Mike had driven the little beauty all the way from Blue Earth to Tyler that morning – it had taken him three hours. It had taken me two and a half. And he was going to drive it back home that same day.

There is actually a reason Mike had decided to attend a car show in Tyler, other than he might have wanted some aebleskivers. His wife, Lenne, a retired Blue Earth Area school teacher, is originally from Tyler and grew up there.

There are plenty of other Blue Earth (and Blue Earth area) and Tyler connections we have found over the years.

A few people have moved from one place to the other, or have relatives here and there. A couple of pastors have been there and come here or vice versa.

In fact, it is almost startling how many connections we have heard about over the years.

For instance, just recently at the car show at Giant Days in Blue Earth I ran into Neil Kruse, formerly of Winnebago. Now Neal and his wife Jan have moved back to his family farm by Verdi, Minnesota, which is, of course, right by Tyler.

And USC in Wells has a new superintendent, Taylor Topinka. He came to USC from Granada-Huntley-East Chain, but before that he was a teacher at, you guessed it, RTR High School in Tyler, Minnesota.

The connections are never ending.