Start of Summer ’10 Road Trip, Part 2: Touring Minnesota

While my previous post about part 1 of my recent road trip was more words than pictures, I’m pretty sure this one will be more pictures than words, or at least closer to 50/50. I’ll pick up where I left off.
On Sun 30 May, I left Green Bay about mid-morning to drive to Two Harbors, Minnesota. On WI-29 a few miles west of Wausau, I spotted a sign pointing the way to a geographical marker four miles north of the highway (near Edgar, Wisconsin). I’ve passed by that sign several times over the years, but never took the time to go check it out. This time I decided I’d go take a look though. I’m a sucker for geography and maps and such things, after all (and let’s face it, I’d gotten in a picture-taking and road-tripping mode!). So I finally visited the marker at 45ºN latitude, 90ºW longitude, only to find out that it’s not exactly at the crossing of those lines. The real crossing is about 1100 feet away from the marker, somewhere in a field (shown below). That part was somewhat disappointing, actually, especially since it was on “Meridian Road.”

Up in Two Harbors almost my entire family was at the Lake Superior house for the weekend. My parents were there, my brother Nathan & Laura and their kids were there, and my sister-in-law Eve and her kids were there too. It was a very efficient way to visit family. 🙂 It was a nice evening, though, so we got a small campfire going on the ledgerock on the lakeshore. Mmmmm, snacking on s’mores while listening to a serene Superior surf…

And then Memorial Day itself was so gorgeous, about 70 and sunny, that after Nathan & Laura left for home, I just sat outside on a bench and a hammock, looking out over the lake, and reading a book for a couple hours. Now that is a relaxing holiday!

After staying at Two Harbors until afternoon, I drove a couple hours over to Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where my Penn State friends Vic & Lindsay live, to hang out with them and see their new house there. The house itself (which is technically in Coleraine, just north of Grand Rapids) is so new that the lawn is still gravel, and the road the house is on doesn’t yet exist on Google Maps or Mapquest! They both absolutely love the culture of Minnesota (Lindsay especially), being in the northwoods surrounded by incredibly friendly people (Minnesota Nice is for real!). They’re appreciating the food too — at dinner we got an appetizer called Minnesota Sushi, which was walleye and wild rice wrapped in lefse. Pure awesomeness. After dinner they also took me for a tour of their office. They both work at WindLogics, a company that focuses on wind forecasting and wind energy. Incidentally, back in college I interviewed for a summer internship with WindLogics in their Saint Paul office once (but I didn’t get it because they’d just hired three full-time people who they needed to train), and it’s a company I’d certainly be interested in applying to once I’m done with my PhD and looking for a “real” job. It really was fun to see Vic & Lindsay again, and to see where they live and work and everything. Since they live only a couple hours from my parents new house in Two Harbors, I anticipate I’ll be usually seeing them when I go home for visits.

In the morning (Tue 1 June), Vic & Lindsay had to go to work, and I initially had planned to go straight home to Cumberland. While we were having breakfast though, I got the idea to drive over to Itasca State Park to see the Headwaters of the Mississippi River, and to Bemidji to see the status of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. I deliberated over it for about 15-20 minutes, but as they were leaving Vic & Lindsay said to me, “You know you want to go, just do it.” I mean, I’d never been to those places before, they’re places I’ve wanted to visit for quite some time, and I’d never been as close as I was (Bemidji is only about 80 miles west of Grand Rapids). So at 8:30 in the morning, instead of heading east on US 2, I headed west to Bemidji. Here are some photos from Paul Bunyan Park, on the shores of Lake Bemidji on the Mississippi River:

From there I grabbed a Subway sandwich to go and drove a half hour south to Itasca State Park. I took the scenic Great River Road to the park, which crossed the fledgling Mississippi several times along the way. I managed to pick the park entrance that was closest to the headwaters, and had lunch on a park bench at the headwaters. And I walked/waded across the Mississippi River four times. Pretty cool. I had always wanted to do that. 🙂

Then I took a walk down Schoolcraft Trail, which went a mile along the North Arm of Lake Itasca from the Headwaters to Hill Point, which looks out at Schoolcraft Island. It was quite a pleasant walk, except for the dozens of mosquitoes that I killed (or, more specifically, the myriads that I didn’t). Out at Hill Point I climbed out onto a tree that was growing horizontally out of the bank out over the water. And I have my camera with me too. That gave me extra incentive not to lose my balance and fall into the drink. 🙂

It was cool to read about the history of the expeditions searching for the source of the Mississippi, and of the early history of the park. I also learned how the lake came to be named Lake Itasca: explorer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, upon being brought to the lake by an Ojibwe guide in 1832, combined the Latin words for “true” (ver-ITAS) and “head” (CA-put). Very interesting. I bought some stuff at the gift shop too (including a painting that I gave to my parents as a gift), and then on my way out of the park I went to one more scenic view, Peace Pipe Vista on the East Arm of Lake Itasca.

Then on the way back from Itasca State Park to Cumberland, WI, I went through the town of Walker, MN, a nice little resort town on Leech Lake. With my office being in Walker Building back at PSU, I just couldn’t stay away from Walker, lol. I even took pictures of downtown Walker as I was driving through! Then I continued to play tourist and snapped some photos of a few other random things on the rest of my drive back to Wisconsin. I’ll say though, there’s a whole lot of nothing in northern Minnesota, unless tamarack swamps and pine forests count as something. It’s really hard to have a cell phone conversation while driving across northern Minnesota and northern Wisconsin!

I got back to Cumberland in time for a late dinner, and then spent the whole next day hanging out at my parents’ house. Well, okay, so I went to Rice Lake to renew my Wisconsin driver’s license Hooray no more awful chin goatee pic from 2002! I actually didn’t have to wait interminably long at the DMV (10 minutes), but I did have to argue with the clerk that it didn’t matter whether I put my residency address or my apartment address here in PA for my mailing address. She tried to say that because I wouldn’t be there for the full 8 years of the license, that I wouldn’t get my renewal notices and whatnot after I moved unless I changed my address. Umm, okay? I’ll have tons of other mail to change addresses for when I finish my degree and move somewhere else too, and it’s not like I’ll be moving back to my parents house when I get my PhD (the lady was trying hard to convince me to use their address as my mailing address, basically insinuating that since I’m a full-time student, I must not be responsible enough to change my address when I move). I still insisted that it be my PA address, and eventually the clerk relented hesitantly and said, “Well, I’ll do what you want, but…” Sigh… Anyway, I was tired from all the driving over the past several days, and I needed to spend at least some time with my parents while I was home, so it was good to take a day off and chill (except for the argument at the DMV, haha). I tried to go for a run that morning too, but after 2-2.5 miles or so, my left foot started hurting pretty bad again (it started hurting after the previous time I ran, which was a week earlier). I had wanted to go about 5.5 miles that day, but my foot put the kibosh on that. Now that it’s been a couple weeks since that run, I’m itching to go on a run again and test it out. We’ll see how it goes.

On the afternoon of Thu 3 June I drove down to White Bear Lake, MN, to hang out with my friends Scott & Katie. Especially since he finished his time in the Navy and came back to the Twin Cities to work on his bachelor’s degree, Scott’s become a very good friend of mine. He’s one of only two people that I keep in regular contact with from high school anymore (the other being Mike, the groom in the Lambeau wedding in my previous post), and someone I make a point of seeing when I come home. Anyway, Scott just graduated this spring from the University of Minnesota with a degree in international affairs, so I of course wanted to celebrate with him! We all went out to Buffalo Wild Wings to pig out and then Dairy Queen to top it all off. So full, but so good! After dinner Scott had a bonfire in his backyard and all the neighbors came over (apparently a typical night for them, which is pretty cool). They have some cool neighbors, including the former long-time Vikings mascot, and a cop for Maplewood, MN (who told us about the two recent police killings, one of whom was his immediate supervisor who died in a shootout…). It sprinkled a couple times very briefly, but overall was quite a nice night for a bonfire. I spent the night there, and then hung out and talked with Scott the next morning, then heading back to Cumberland after lunch. It was great to see him again. And maybe I’ll get to see him more frequently in the future, if he gets one of the jobs in New York or Washington that he’s applying for. Scott’s done a lot of cool stuff already so far with his time in the Navy as a Rescue Swimmer and then his study abroad recently in China, and no doubt he’ll get to do a lot more cool stuff with whatever job he gets, wherever in the world it is. He just not always at liberty to say a ton about it. 😉

I didn’t stay at home in Cumberland that night because my parents went back up to Two Harbors again for the weekend. Instead I went over to my brother Nathan & Laura’s house for dinner and a game night, but not before loading up some old clothes from my closet and books from my bookcase into my car. Since my parents are planning on moving at some point in the next year or so, and since I had the room in my car to transport them this time, I figured I may as well. Now I’ve just gotta figure out what to do with all of it back here in my apartment! Anyway, that night we played a 6-player game of Settlers: Cities and Knights (me, Nathan, Laura, and three of their four kids, Miriam, Rebecca and Andrew). The game started at 8pm, but was a marathon event that didn’t finish until quarter to 1am! Scarcity of wood for everyone will grind progress to a halt in that game, for sure. It was good to spend some time with all of them too. But with my parents gone, and with me starting the drive back to PA the next day, I chose to spend the night there.
I hope you all enjoyed the preponderance of photos in this post! I’ll leave it there for now, and soon I’ll put up Part 3 about my fun with funnel clouds on the way back to PA! That deserves a post all its own, after all. 🙂