From Pines to Prairie

First, thanks to everyone for your enthusiastic, generous responses to us as we embarked. We are grinning widely.

Moments before we left Thunder Bay yesterday morning, a flock of Canadian geese flew overhead, journeying south. Isn't that poetic? I think it likely that we didn’t travel much faster than them. We were delayed first by good coffee and good company, then by a friendly but very curious border officer, then by driving around a beautiful lake that you’d think was the biggest in the world (okay, it is,) then by an erratic smart phone/gps provider.

The latter made us stay awhile in Minneapolis and we were delightedly surprised with how much we liked the city. Magers & Quinn, an indie bookstore with a deep selection of new and used books, provided our Minnesota reads. We selected Minn of the Mississippi (I confess that before this trip I did not know the Mississippi River began in Minnesota ) and The Birchbark House by local author Louise Erdrich (a beautiful Ojibwa story that will provide a necessarily counter perspective to the one Maeve is currently reading in the Little House on the Prairie series.) 

Wildflowers in Vera's Garden, Minneapolis

While waiting for the phone to be looked at (not fixed, it turns out) we wandered through Vera’s Garden, a gorgeous community garden planted on the Midtown Greenway. The Midtown Greenway was last year named the best urban bike trail in the US. Formerly a rail line, the path is now busy with cyclists and pedestrians. Hungry, we walked down the street to discover Bryant Lake Bowl. Bowling! Vegetarian (mostly) diner! Theatre showing a provocative play about Harriet Tubman! Beer! – all under one roof. A good afternoon indeed.

Bowling and beer and beet burgers, oh my!

 

The kids fell asleep shortly after hitting the road again and didn’t notice when we slipped from the land of lakes to the prairie. It got dark, so we didn’t notice much either except the thousands of blinking red lights from the hundreds of wind turbines. We eventually decided to stay just short of our destination, in a (cheap but really nice motel clearly frequented by hunters – see photo below.) 

Friendly sign in our motel room

The only disappointments of the day were lack of cheese curds (Maeve declared she needed some and not more than one minute later we saw a billboard advertising Free Cheese Curds!!! Alas, we could not find internet access to see if this could be true) and lack of pie (How am I traveling with someone who would zoom right by a giant sign that declares the best pies in Minnesota made right there??!! I’m working on us slowing down, especially for pie.)