We had a romantic vision of what a winter road trip to Minnesota would look like: snowshoeing over fields of fresh powder, frozen waterfalls, and ice skating on one of the 10,000 lakes, winter festivals and ice bars in Minneapolis, and sledding in a park before warming up in front of a fire. With a blizzard in October this year, who would have guessed it would be warm, gray, and drizzly for our visit? Minnesota is amazingly our 49th state to visit as a family, an incredible accomplishment for us that we are so proud to experience with our kids. As we ventured into the great north of the upper Midwest, we started to regret not budgeting more time to see it all. Next time! Minnesota is huge, it’s the 12th largest state. The state motto of 10,000 lakes is just a branding message, the truth is Minnesota has 11,842 lakes over ten acres, ranking Minnesota as third in the union for the most lakes falling behind Alaska and Wisconsin. The state is big enough that we realized we couldn’t day trip from Minneapolis or Rochester to Duluth, Voyager’s National Park, or the headwaters of the Mississippi River. Next time! We were able to leave earlier than we planned, so we added a visit to Iowa on our way. We found a unique boutique hotel, Hotel Pommier, in Indianola, Iowa for our first night. The hotel had nice common areas, ping pong, a gym, and was near restaurants. What sold us was the room, it had three full beds which was ideal for our family of four with two teenagers. We walked to Z’s Eatery and Draft Haus where we found a great dinner. We’d heard great things about Pella and headed to visit the next morning. The route to Pella included a drive over a one mile long bridge crossing the Red Rock Lake. We had a self-guided tour of Pella with beef sticks and jerky from In’t Veld’s Meat Market, Americanos and lattes from The Sanctuary Coffee House, checked the time while the Klokkenspel chimed, and walked through a number of the shops. We have family in Iowa and, after some google research, decided to make a detour to visit the site of a former family business in downtown Nevada, Iowa. We found the site and took pictures before finding a nice coffee shop, Farmhouse Coffee. Moving quick, we headed to Ames to get a very brief campus visit of Iowa State University before stopping for an amazing lunch at The Cafe, also in Ames. We loved the feel of this spot as well as all of the food we ordered, The Cafe is top of the list for our return visit. Over lunch, we decided we could fit in one more stop before heading to our home the next few nights. We set the GPS to Faribault Mill in Faribault, Minnesota. Faribault Mill has been making beautiful wool blankets at the mill in Faribault on the Cannon River since the 1860s. The pride and craftsmanship exhibited in the products and by the staff was incredible. We were given a brief tour of the mill, even though we’d already kept the staff 10-15 minutes after closing time, because they wanted us to see how their products are made. On to our stop for the evening was the CenterStone Plaza Hotel in Rochester. We selected this location because of the on-site restaurant that looked great for us. Twigs Tavern, located on the first floor of Centerstone Plaza, offered an extensive gluten free menu. Everything we tried over two dinners at Twigs was very good. On to visit the twin cities in a single day. We started our fast tour at Minnehaha Falls. The falls are a 53-foot drop in a beautiful park. The water was partially frozen but water was still flowing. We headed over to nearby Northern Coffeeworks to warm up and map out our next stop. Next we headed to Saint Paul to explore the Minnesota State Capitol. The Capitol was stunning with ceilings hand painted, amazing murals, and beautiful artwork on display throughout the building. State capitols have become a go-to spot for us when we have the opportunity, they are a great place to see art and history unique to a state. We headed back toward Minneapolis with another driving tour of a campus, this time the huge and beautiful University of Minnesota. We paid a visit to Ingebretsen’s, a Nordic marketplace of food and gifts. This place was packed with holiday shoppers and the line for the meat market may have been 100 deep as shoppers waited for Swedish Meatballs and other specialties. Already having covered a lot of ground, we headed to Brim for lunch. Brim is also gluten free with sandwiches served on bread made at Sift Bakery. Brim was delish and the service was great, we would have loved to also visit Sift. Our next attraction was the Minnesota Institute of Art. The museum was big with more to see than we had time to explore. We picked a few galleries that sounded interesting and headed for these. We hit the REI to finish a bit of holiday shopping before making a stop we were apprehensive about making: the Mall of America. Mall of America is three floors, each just over a mile loop, with over 520 stores, 40 million annual visitors, 5.6 millionsquare feet. MOA receives three times the annual visitors of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and generates $2 billion dollars annually in revenue. Our kids only know busy malls from seeing Starcourt Mall in Stranger Things season three and watching Paul Blart patrol the mall's concourse. We walked all three miles in two overwhelming hours. We ended our long day with dinner at Twigs before crashing out exhausted. Our last full day in Minnesota was a Friday and we decided to stay in Rochester and take it easy. We started with great coffees at Steam before browsing Janky Gear, which sells consignment outdoor gear. It was drizzly so we walked the downtown Rochester Skywalk around Mayo connecting downtown hotels, shops, and the library. We had lunch and pick up groceries at Peoples Food Coop and checked out Kismet Consignment. After several long days, our prior plans of hiking in the damp weather and mud didn’t sound as good. We instead ordered tickets to see Wonka and enjoyed an afternoon show. Our final stop of the trip was Forager Cafe and Brewery, where we enjoyed great drinks and an outstanding meal. Although the weather wasn't what we expected in December, Minnesota was a very good winter destination. We would happily return in the summer to explore the lakes, the North Woods, and Duluth. Maybe even in the winter. The coming travel year promises to be a great one, we plan to return to the southwest and check off state number 50!
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AuthorsShane and Jessica Archives
March 2023
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