A question for you. If you had a chance to travel in a time machine, which way would you go? Back to sometime in the past or off to sometime in the future?

I have asked a few people that question this past week and it seems to be a split between the past and the future, with the past slightly ahead in the voting.

I have always been fascinated with time travel. I am not sure why. Maybe I read the book “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells when I was young and maybe that did it. But I know that any book or movie that is about time travel has my total interest. So, yes, I was a big fan of the three “Back to the Future” movies. I am sure I own them both on VHS and DVD, and I watched them a lot of times. In those movies both Marty McFly and Doc go both back in time and forward into the future.

So, which would you do?

For me, it would be the past. There are several places I would like to visit in the past. You might be surprised to learn that I would not want to travel back to some historic moments, but rather to some places I am curious about. I would like to see the house I grew up in, my grandparents’ farm. Sure, I saw these places as a child, but I have a foggy memory of them. I would like to see Mankato, because it is getting difficult to remember what it looked like when I went to college there in 1970 – it has changed so much and looks totally different now.

Truthfully, though, what got me thinking about traveling back in time this past week were some photos by Kevin Mertens in last week’s Faribault County Register. They were the photos of the painted murals in the American Legion Hall that are hidden above the false ceiling.

I would really like to travel back in time and see those murals when they were inside the Sandon Theater in Blue Earth. I would like to see exactly what it looked like, because it is described as being quite the place.

Not only that, but I would love to see what the Converse Opera House, that was in that same Sandon Theater location first, looked like. A photo in the Blue Earth Sesquicentennial book is a faint black and white photo. But I understand that it was magnificent inside.

And while I was time traveling, I would also want to see what Blue Earth looked like back in the “olden days.” The pictures from back then make the downtown look like a great collection of dozens of ornate buildings containing lots of interesting features.

And, while I was at it, I would head down the nine miles to Elmore, which, from all descriptions and some old photos, was quite a little town with lots and lots of businesses.

I could skip back a few years in my time machine and maybe see when the Constans Hotel was actually just a big log cabin and then a fort. And then I could see the lot where my house stands on Main Street when it was the site of Blue Earth’s livery stable. I could even walk a block down 10th Street and grab a beer at the Fleckenstein Brewery which was located at the southwest corner of what is now 10th and Nicollet streets (back then called Valencia and Jefferson streets).

And then, just for fun, I would take my time machine and set it for 1855 with the location a mile up the Blue Earth River from Putnam Park and find Moses Sailor’s log cabin and say hi to him and talk about how a mile north of the cabin would be an excellent site for a nice small town.

When I returned in the time machine to present day, what a heckuva fantastic story will that be for the Faribault County Register. I better remember to take my camera with me….there could be a great photo op….