The Skybound Family Festival and Fly-In Breakfast is happening this Saturday from 8am-Noon at the Marshfield Municipal Airport.
The event is the grand finale of the Discovery Education Station’s Blast Off! Rocketry Camp. I spoke with Linda Roehrborn, Founder of the Discovery Education Station, and she discussed the event in more detail.
Once again, the Skybound Family Festival and Fly-In Breakfast is being held this Saturday from 8am-Noon at the Marshfield Municipal Airport. They’re also looking for volunteers for the event. If you’d like to help, call 715-898-1196.
(AI assisted transcription of the interview by Otter.ai):
Linda: “WE are going to have a whole bunch of aviation related activities for kids. We’re going to have the breakfast. I’m trying to bring back the fly-in breakfast that we used to have at the Marshfield airport, like decades ago.”
“This year, we’re just doing like a continental breakfast. So, I just want to bring it back. And then we’re also going to have vendors there. So, usually I have a fundraiser back here in Wenzel Plaza behind Discovery Education station.”
“But instead of doing two events in the summer, I decided it was just too much. So, I want to do one event at the airport. I want to get people to the airport to help them know that we have an airport and kind of bring aviation back to the community.”
“We’re also going to be fundraising for a special needs handicap accessible vehicle. We work with special needs kids and adults in our community and so when we take them out on field trips and Saturday trips, right now, we are basically caravaning with all of us, all the providers, so having a handicap accessible vehicle will be so much easier just to have everybody in one vehicle.”
Riley: “Can you talk a little bit about some of the fun activities that you’re going to have there this Saturday?”
Linda: “Absolutely. So we have Dan Reese, he’s coming with his drones. We’re going to have the ham radio organization from Marshfield out there. We’re going to have bounce houses. We’re going to have a mining slough.”
“So, if you don’t know what a mining slough is, it’s like panning for gold. So, we have bags already built, and the kids come up and they can mine for their own gems. Those are going to be $10 a bag, and that goes back to Discovery for our handicap accessible vehicle.”
“We’re also going to have stuff a stuffy, so you can pick we have about six different stuffies to choose from. We have Santa Summer Toy Workshop, and then, like I said, the vendors, we’re going to have a petting zoo.”
“We’re going to have some of our animals out there. We have animals for our animal ambassador program. We just had three baby chinchillas, so they’re about a month old. They’ll be out there with us. We have a partner that’s going to bring his snakes along. So ,there’s going to be a lot of exciting, different science, hands on activities that the kids can experience with their families.”
Riley: “As you mentioned, this will be as a fundraiser for the Discovery Education Station. Can you talk a little bit about that? Just talk about the education station in general, and what kind of things you do there?”
Linda: “Sure, yes. So, I’ll backtrack a little bit. I started discovery when I first moved back home to take care of my mom. I am an assimilated astronaut for NASA and I have a degree in oceanography, and we have neither here. I thought, ‘well, maybe I can share my exciting life and my experiences with the kids.’
And that’s kind of where Discovery was born from. As of January this year, I decided with my staff, we want to focus on special needs families and kids, because there’s such a huge gap in our community and surrounding counties.”
“I mean all through the world, really, but locally, there’s a huge gap for resources and assistance for families and so we partner with the state of Wisconsin with the CLTs program and also with IRIS to work with special needs kids and adults.”
“So, we have a facility here in Marshfield. We’re at 248 South Central Avenue, and we have a little store in the front. So, we also partner with local vendors, mom and dads that do things on the side for fun and all that. All those proceeds go back into discovery. We are a nonprofit, so that’s where we do the fundraising and things like that.”
Riley: “And you guys do a lot of activities, especially during the summer, I notice all the different activities you do throughout the summer.”
Linda: “Yep. So, we have camps all summer. I think we had a total of nine camps this summer. We’re done with the camps now, but next year we’ll have more exciting activities. We do go to Fairy Fest. We went to Hub City Days.”
“We’re doing this event. We’re going to be at the fair later in August, so we try to pile on all the activities in the summer, because in the winter, we’d rather be here so families can drop off their kids or come in with their kids.”
“We’ve added activities that they can do indoors. I know there’s a lot of parents out there that are always asking, ‘Where can we take the kids for the winter and not have to drive out of town in the snow and ice?’ And so we’ve added the mining slough. We have a microscope. We’re adding VR, we’re just adding a whole bunch of cool activities for families.”
Riley: “If people wanted to learn more about Discovery Education Station or if they’d like to learn more about the Skybound Family Festival and Fly-In Breakfast happening this Saturday, where can they go to do that?”
Linda: “Yeah, so our website, discoveryedustation.org, or they can check out our Facebook page is discoveryedustation, or they can even call us at 715-898-1196, or they can stop it. And we have flyers. If they want to come pick up a flyer, or even if they want us to email them a flyer, they can definitely call us and ask for that, and then our address again is 248 South Central Avenue in Marshfield.
Riley: “Is there anything else you’d like to add?”
Linda: “I just hope that people can come out. It’s going to be a really exciting event. I really want to bring aviation to the Central Wisconsin area, because it’s something that we don’t have and I think it’s going to be really exciting. Lots of kids activities coming up. My whole life has been about aviation or space, and so I want to introduce that to our community.”
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