We are still waiting for the travel season to pick up down here at the windmill. April’s unpredictable weather and another early Easter have us waiting with anticipation for the wave to come. We’ve already scheduled two bus tours to come through later this year.

Our It Takes a Village fundraiser is still underway with one Sunday left. All tour admissions generated on Sundays this month are going to the Daycare. This is a great opportunity to tour the Mill, learn something new about it, and see it working while contributing to a great cause for an important local organization to all of us. So far we’ve raised over $500.00 and we think we can do much better. We hope to double that this coming Sunday. We will have Spartan Pizza outside the windmill from 11 to 5 and Viking demonstrators will be onsite, too. Don’t forget there are picnic tables out back. The windmill will be open and running from 10 to 5, and if the wind is there we will even be grinding. We sincerely hope to see an explosion of local support this last week, so please come out and show your support. General admission is $5.00 for adults and FREE for kids 12 and under. Members with free admission may contribute free-will donations. Come see all of the changes and improvements we’ve made. We guarantee you will learn something about the windmill that you didn’t know before and Shaun will be personally giving tours and grinding demonstrations throughout the day. Thank you very much to those that have contributed already and all of our food sponsors for being open on Sundays with us.

And speaking of improvements, we’ve got more exciting changes to announce. First, the Vestergaard ledger is now on display for the first time. Visitors may view the ledger and our new butter cookie tin exhibit inside the video room. And in continuing our efforts to boost engagement for kids, we’ve added both a play area and art board. The gift shop now has a kids table for children to relax and busy themselves while their parents mill about. In the video room, we have a new bulletin board where kids can have their drawings of the windmill displayed. We have coloring sheets at the windmill or it can be hand-drawn, it doesn’t matter to us. Help us get the board filled for the first time! Coloring sheets are available at the windmill or library. We’ll be developing this program more very soon.

We’re also very excited about our new addition to the Welcome Center and our website, our new social media wall! Visitors can post on Facebook or Instagram using our social media tags and be posted on both our TV and online at danishwindmill.org/social. We’re very excited to have this for the coming year and hope to especially get people engaged during Tivoli. Help us get it filled with new content by posting a picture to Facebook with the tag @DanishWindmill or on Instagram using our hashtags: #DanishWindmill; #DanishVillages; #ElkHornIA; #TivoliFest; or #JuleFest.

Finally, we’ve been working on another spectacular Tivoli Fest, too. This year as part of our grant with Iowa Tourism, we will have five small billboards posted in the area advertising for Tivoli. We’ve also built a full webpage for anyone to share over at TivoliFest.com. Check it out and see everything going on in the largest festival of the year in the Danish Villages.