Minnesota Czech Slovak Queen Pageant

Well...it's been a while since my last CRAZY road trip so we thought we were about due for another! HAHA!

We left for Minnesota at 3:30am to make it there for a lunch with the contestants. We got there even earlier than planned and went up to New Prague to see the sights there. I found an awesome wallet with a crown on it in one of the shops there along with wine wafers made in the Czech Republic for hundreds of years. Lunch with the girls was great and all of the contestants were so much fun. I had a blast getting to know them and knew the pageant would be great! After lunch the girls had to go to their dress rehearsal so I decided to tour the town of Montgomery, MN. We first went to their kroj display. It was awesome because they had a collection of kroj from past MN queens. I remembered seeing a lot of them in Wilber at the national pageant in years past. They had Becky's dolls there too. (Becky was the MN queen in 2004 when I first ran as a chapter queen and we have kept in touch since.) Then we found a Czech imports shop where I bought a painted glass and some honey for my roommate (who has her own honey bees.) I ran into Leah (another past MN queen) and surprised her because she didn't know I was coming for the pageant. After killing a bit of time I went back to the David's house to get ready for the evening. They were so kind to open their house up to the visiting queens.

As expected the pageant was awesome. :) I was excited that one of the Robitcek Scholars from UNL, Helena, came with the national queen Brianna. She was new to all of this queen stuff and loves to take photos so it was fun to sit with her and watch her reaction to how the queens represent the Czech heritage. They had 4 contestants this year and all of them deserved to be queen. In the end Debbie was crowned the new MN Czech-Slovak Queen and will compete with me in Wilber in August. We are gonna have a blast together. I wish we could have stayed longer for their dance after the pageant but could only stay for a few hours as we had to be back in Omaha at 9am the next morning.

Funny story...before we left the dance we were talking to a group of people from MN about polka bands. They had once played in a small town in Nebraska and while they were there everyone told them they had to go to the Clarkson Czech Festival as it was just a short drive. They drove up and watched part of the pageant and enjoyed the festivities. They said they had a blast watching this girl performing her talent at the pageant. She was singing Annie in the Cabbage patch and acting like the boy...then acting like the girl....ok those of you who know me....is this starting to sound familiar....IT WAS ME!!!!!!!!!!! HAHA! I was laughing so hard that of all the things and all of the people they remembered from the festival it was my performance.

We were back on the road for a long drive (although I slept almost the whole way.) We were hoping to drive all but an hour back but when I woke up we were in Omaha. We wanted to find a cheap hotel room as we would only be there for about 4 hours (as it was already 4am by the time we arrived) and thought it would be no problem....boy were we wrong! There must have been something going on in town that night because we stopped at 5 or 6 places and they were all booked full. We were about to head back to Lincoln when we made one more stop and FINALLY found a place to crash for the night. 8am would come pretty early to head to the Omaha festival the next day!

Na Shledanou,
Stefanie Vocasek
2009-10 Nebraska Czech-Slovak Queen