Adventures in Gopherland

Flannel, Hotdish and Trapper Hats: Attending Wabasha’s Grumpy Old Men Festival

The pop culture picture of Minnesota is probably best encapsulated in the image of someone ice fishing while wearing buffalo plaid and a trapper hat. The image is inspired by several cultural depictions. One is certainly “Fargo”, though the city of Fargo, while on the Minnesota border, is actually in North Dakota. A more Minnesotan example is “Grumpy Old Men”, set in Wabasha, MN along the Mississippi River. The residents of Wabasha know this and they throw an annual Grumpy Old Men Festival in the movie’s honor. The festival was in late February before coronavirus and we showed up, not knowing it would be one of the last public events we would attend before coronavirus swept the nation.

So how does one celebrate Grumpy Old Men? By watching crabby grandpas argue with the comedic wit of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon? To do that, you should just watch the movie. By ice fishing on the frozen river? I wanted to, but February in Minnesota was unseasonably warm, meaning there was no ice and the annual Grumpy Old Men ice fishing competition was cancelled. An icy plunge? We are not quite Minnesotan enough for that. By dressing up in buffalo check flannel and trapper hats and gathering to eat hotdish? Yes, that is something we can do.

To get to Wabasha, we travelled east until we reached the Mississippi River and then followed the river south. Even though the weather had been too warm for thick ice to form, the day was chilly with a biting breeze coming down the river. We arrived in downtown Wabasha and found the streets deserted. We walked though several blocks of the main street and were surprised to find no one, given that the festival was allegedly in full swing. We walked down to the river and gazed across at the river at the other bank, the state of Wisconsin and the Eastern half of the United States. There were movie-themed cutouts nearby, so we posed with them and then continued on toward the church where the hotdish luncheon was scheduled to take place.

Arriving at the church and opening the front door, we suddenly discovered why the town was empty: the entire town was inside. People were bustling about and greeting one another and I felt out of place. When we told the lady at the ticket booth that we had never been to the festival before, there was a distinct note of surprise in her welcoming response: it appeared that most people there came to the festival every year and newcomers like us stood out.

We were ushered into the fellowship hall where several long tables were filled with about fifty different hotdishes brought by different members of the community. Hotdish, for the uninitiated, basically means a casserole. Most hotdishes feature a meat, like ground beef, and a starch, like tater tots, mixed with vegetables and a savory sauce. Every family’s hotdish recipe is different, however, as witnessed by the incredible variety of hotdishes in front of us.

I got just a sample of each of the hotdishes that looked appetizing, just even then I had to be choosy in whether to take the turkey, broccoli and wild rice hotdish or the beef, bean and tomato hotdish. After filling our plates, we arrived at the drink table where there was one option: 2% milk. With our plates and milk, then, we made our way to an empty table near the front.

As we had entered, people had been chatting, but it died away as we approached our table as performers had just stood up on their makeshift stage. They announced the ongoing Walter Matthau lookalike competition and pointed out people in the room who were serious contenders. Then they reminded us all of a charity raffle for Grumpy Old Men merchandise, before they picked up their guitar, accordion and harmonica and started to play.

We ate our hotdish, laughing along with the performers who played ridiculous songs mixed with country ballads and songs from the Grumpy Old Men soundtrack. They continued to announce about the raffle and eventually announced the winner of the Walter Matthau lookalike contest to be the same man as the past six years running. When he stood up to be recognized, it was easy to see why.

When we left the church, the streets were again deserted. I do not know if there was any other part of the festival occurring that year, it did not take long in the whipping cold wind to convince us that we had participated sufficiently in the revelry and we should return home where it was warm.

Dog Days of Winter: Duluth in January

In northern Minnesota on the banks of Lake Superior lies Duluth. To get there you take I-35 north until the highway ends. In between the Iron Range of mountains and the windswept Lake Superior, it is a gateway to the wilderness that attracts adventurers in the summer and becomes a frozen shell of itself in the winter. Naturally we visited in January.

Now one thing that the frozen Northlands are known for is sled dog racing. In fact, the second longest sled dog race in the United States (behind the Iditarod) is the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon and it starts in Duluth in mid-January. The sled dog race was one of the things that brought us to Duluth that winter day, because the race begins with a weekend of festivities in Duluth, several of which involve adorable sled dogs.

We headed north one Saturday morning, watching as the landscape changed from urban to suburban to farming to forests as we continued north of the Twin Cities. The weather changed too and things got colder and snowier as we approached Lake Superior. On the way we stopped at a road stop advertising the World’s Largest Walleye, allegedly caught by Paul Bunyan. I have no way of fact checking the claim, mind you, but it was a strangely large statue of a walleye to be outside a random gas station in northern Minnesota, so I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

We arrived in Duluth under gray skies and headed to Fitger’s Brewhouse, an old factory that has been converted into a strange shopping center with narrow wooden hallways winding through old buildings and up and down stairs to various small booths and shops. At the center of the complex is a restaurant where we had lunch. I ate a poutine and cheese curd burger with a wild race patty with a cup of beer cheese soup as it was the most Minnesotan thing I could conceptualize.

After lunch, we stayed in Fitger’s Brewhouse because it was there that the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon weekend would begin with a puppy dog show where forty dog owners were spread out across the complex with their puppies. It was then the responsibility of self-sacrificing volunteers like us to go around and pet and play with each puppy. We would cast votes for the cutest puppy and they would be compiled to award the correct contestant. Perhaps not surprisingly many of the puppies were huskies, but there were dogs of every type from retrievers to malamutes and labradors to corgis. After a grueling afternoon of scratching dog’s heads and playing with adorable puppies we cast our votes and headed on with our day (My vote came down to a tough decision between a very playful husky and a very cute corgi, but the corgi won me over in the end).

Our next stop was the Glensheen Mansion. It is one of the biggest landmarks of Duluth, a preserved historic house from the early twentieth century that was built for and occupied by the Congdons, a wealthy Duluth family involved in law, politics and the coal industry. The house was beautiful, filled with fantastic art, ornate furniture and expansive rooms. It was certainly not the first historic home I had ever visited, but it was the first that seemed like a place I would actually like to live. Looking through the windows of the study onto the garden covered in snow and the banks of Superior, I imagined that it would be an excellent and inspiring place to work. The billiard room and ballroom seemed less like spaces on a Clue board and more like actually enjoyable places ready for the party to resume at any minute. The snowy grounds were inaccessible, but it was easy to imagine a pleasant stroll by the fountain and down to the boat shed in the summer months.

We continued and headed to the downtown port where Duluth’s most iconic image lies: the Aerial Lift Bridge. It is like a draw bridge but instead of the bridge dividing as it is raised, the entire roadway of the bridge ascends straight up into the air. It connects the mainland to a peninsula that was cut off by the creation of a canal for freight ships entering the Duluth harbor. We viewed it from the Bayfront Park.

Also in the Bayfront Park was the Great Lakes Aquarium, celebrating the variety of wildlife and aquatic life in the Great Lakes. The Aquarium was celebrating John Beargrease Sled Dog Days by hosting a sled dog art exhibit. We toured the aquarium, petting sand sharks and staring up at multiple-story-tall fish tanks of trout. We saw moray eels, tropical fish and bald eagles and finished our visit with a tour of the gallery of sled dog art.

We emerged as the sun was setting and we once again photographed the Aerial Lift Bridge, now gleaming as it reflect the days final rays. We got dinner nearby and then headed home, having had a busy and enjoyable day exploring Duluth in the dead of winter. Here are some of the photos from our trip:

A Scandinavian Celebration: The American Swedish Institute

It turns out there are Swedish centers of culture other than IKEA stores and ABBA reunion tours.

Scandinavian culture has been an important theme for us recently, with us writing about our Norwegian feast at the St. Olaf Christmas Festival and our Finnish food with friends in St. Paul. Before Minnesota, I knew very little about the Nordic countries and about half of what I knew came from a Scandinavian webcomic I followed for years. In Minnesota, however, we had rapidly become better acquainted with Nordic culture and we were intrigued to visit the American Swedish Institute and see what it means to be Swedish.

The American Swedish Institute is an old castle-like home in Minneapolis that has been made into a museum memorializing the experience of Swedish-American immigrants and Swedish-American populations in Minnesota. The mansion also contains a Swedish restaurant and functions as a cultural center with year-round classes teaching the Swedish language, Swedish cooking and Swedish crafts.

The mansion was built for Swan Turnblad and his wife Christina. Turnblad was an immigrant who came to America as a boy in 1868 and rose to riches in a story that could have been written by Horatio Alger where a penniless boy got a job as a typesetter for a Swedish newspaper printing company and within ten years he ascended to become sole owner. As the owner of the popular Swedish language newspaper, Swan also became the center of Swedish-American pride in Minnesota and his home is still important to the community long after his death.

When we visited the museum it was January and the house was still decorated to display a Scandinavian Christmas. We entered through a gift shop which was wrapped in a building-sized Christmas bow. A path then attached the gift shop to the mansion. One of the guides working in the gift shop proudly let us know that six of the rooms in the mansion where decorated to reflect a historical Scandinavian-American Christmas from a different country in a different era, such as Norwegian immigrants in the 1940s and Finnish immigrants in the 1990s. The guide’s voice dropped as she explained that the rooms had things from not only from Swedish people, but also from the strange cultures of Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish people. There was even a room dedicated to Celtic Americans and one look from the guide communicated that she viewed this as a betrayal of the Swedish identity of the organization and the world was officially upside down.

We stuck out in the museum both because (1) we were not Swedish and (2) almost everyone else there had been there previously. We made our way through the rooms of the mansion that were decorated for Christmas with large candles and colorful wreathes and onto the second floor where the individual national exhibits were.

On our way, we were challenged to find three “tomtes”, or garden gnomes or figurines with tall shiny hats on squat bodies. All three tomtes have been included in the pictures below, so you are challenged to find all three. Look for them here:

Beautiful Flowers, Spectacular Views and Some Pickled Herring: Exploring St. Paul with Friends

Showing off your area to friends from out of town is fun, even when it involves eating pickled herring. As I mentioned last week, we had several visitors over last October to whom we showed the city. A week after my parents visited, we were joined by our good friends Jameson and Christine.

We wanted to show them highlights of the Twin Cities without simply repeating too many things we had previously done, so we decided to check out a new-to-us zoo and conservatory in St. Paul in the morning and then show some of the Minneapolis highlights from our experience in the afternoon.

Our visit began in St. Paul where we visited the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory. We did not spend much time in the zoo section of the facility and headed straight for the greenhouses. We still saw animals, however, as even in the greenhouse section there were docents showing off reptiles and encouraging children to pet them.

The greenhouses were beautifully designed with rooms containing the flora of different climates. Entering some of these rooms was breathtaking as you saw displayed before you a perfectly designed spectacle of colors uniting to form a living painting with flowers as the pigments. We continued around the greenhouses until our path brought us outside and through outdoor gardens including the stunningly beautiful Como Ordway Memorial Japanese Garden.The garden was the beautiful part of our visit to Como Park, partially because it was the perfect week of autumn and the colors of changing leaves made the trees of the garden glow.

After having spent time among the beautiful flowers and walking through the serene Japanese garden, we left Como Park stopping by Como Park’s Cafesjian’s Carousel on our way out. The carousel was built in 1914 by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company and it is one of the few remaining carousels from that era still in good, unmodified condition. A Wurlitzer 153 band organ sits on one side and plays music as the carousel turns. Our friends rode the carousel while we watched. Afterwards we all headed to lunch.

Now, Minnesotan culture and cuisine has been famously influenced by the traditions of immigrants from Scandinavia. We would get a taste for Norwegian food like lutefisk at the Christmas Festival, but before then we chose to explore together with our friends the flavors and tastes of Finnish cuisine.

We ate lunch at a Finnish bistro creatively named The Finnish Bistro. None of us were accustomed to Finnish dishes, so we explored the menu, trying reindeer sausage, Finnish beef pasties, lefse and stuffed cabbage rolls. I graciously ordered a side of pickled herring to share with the rest of the table, but my fellow diners seemed strangely reluctant to eat the pickled chunks of fish and insisted that I should finish the herring myself. The taste was similar other pickled products, such as pickled beets, and a texture similar to chewy stew meat. The vinegary taste of the herring did not accompany my stuffed cabbage rolls well, so I left some of the herring for others in case they changed their minds. They did not. After lunch, we got pulla lattes and café miels and headed on our way.

We continued to Minnehaha Falls and St. Anthony Falls Dam, both of which we were visiting for the third time in two months. This time, however, we were truly experts and could show off the area. On our prior visits, the weather had been raining and hailing, but not this time. This day was one of the most gorgeous days of the year. The sun glistened off the turbulent water as we walked around and showed our friends Minnehaha Falls. We then headed to the Guthrie Theater where from the cantilevered Infinite Bridge we saw St. Anthony Falls Dam in crystal clear weather. The color blue was brilliantly blue, the color white appeared impossibly white, and everything was crisp and beautiful. The windows of the bridge are perfectly located and angled to highlight the most beautiful views and the mirrored sides of the windows enhance the spectacle, making it both the perfect day and the perfect place to see the city.

I am glad we got the chance to show of our city to our friends and that the weather cooperated. Here are some of my photos from their visit:

Como Park:

Lefse and Picked Herring:

Minnehaha Falls:

St. Anthony’s Dam:

Wind Chill, Lutefisk and the St. Olaf Choir: A Minnesota Christmas

Christmas is a wonderful time full of a flurry of activities and quite a few flurries of snow. We celebrated Christmas in Minnesota in several uniquely Minnesotan ways and those are recounted here.

St. Olaf Christmas Festival:

St. Olaf College, where I have taught for the past year, is a small, academically exceptional school in southern Minnesota. If there are two things that St. Olaf College is known for they are that the school is proud of its Norwegian Lutheran heritage (St. Olaf is the patron saint of Norway) and that its has one of the best choral programs at a liberal arts institution in the United States. (If there is a third claim to fame, it is that Betty White’s Golden Girls character told stories about it.)

The Norwegian heritage and choral skill of St. Olaf combine every December for the biggest event of the college’s year: The St. Olaf Christmas Festival. The school goes all out for the festival in which about half of students are in some way involved. Campus shuts down for four days and there is a surge of returning alumni and visitors as people prepare for one of the most well-known collegiate annual choral programs.

We got tickets for us, our pastor and his wife to attend the big choral program. The program is too large to be held in the chapel or any of the normal performance spaces, so the athletic complex is converted into a performance hall with room for 500 students to be simultaneously performing at the front while thousands of people gather to watch each performance. Over the weekend, a total of 12,000 visitors come to watch the performances.

We found our seats, which were on the floor near the front. Once everyone in the audience was situated, the lights dimmed and five different choirs and an orchestra filed down the aisles to take their positions at the front. I caught the eyes of several of my students who seemed surprised and happy to see their professor in attendance. The lights dimmed further, the conductor raised his baton and the music started.

I was blown away. I am a fan of choral music and have heard plenty of choirs perform, but I was amazed at the sound of the musicians. First everyone performed, then the orchestra, then one choir, then the next and then the audience stood and sung a hymn together. Who was performing was passed back and forth and through it all the entire choir stood at the front arrayed in their differently colored choir robes to indicate to which choir they belonged. I was completely following along was absorbed in the moment until we reached another congregational hymn and I looked at my program or the lyrics and discovered they were in Norwegian. Nevertheless, the song rang out from the audience and I felt out of place as I tried to decipher the letters on the page. I concluded that many of my fellow audience members must be alumni of the choirs given the harmonies I heard all around me. The final piece of the concert was Beautiful Savior by F. Melius Christiansen. It is an incredibly recognizable hymn that has a special place at St. Olaf as F. Melius Christiansen was the choral director at St. Olaf and he was the person who organized the first Christmas Festival some 107 years prior.

The choral and orchestral performance was amazing, but it was not our only experience of the weekend. We also sang along with the Norsemen Concert Band who was performing Christmas Carols (again, this included a number of my students) and we attended the Norwegian Feast.

The Norwegian Feast is an annual celebration where the St. Olaf cafeteria prepares a tradition Scandinavian feast for the Christmas Festival visitors. The food was almost entirely unfamiliar to Katie and I from the sweet rommegrot porridge and potato lefse, to the salmon gravlax and the dessert of riskrem with lingonberries. More than any of this, however, they were serving lutefisk and we got to try some. To the uninformed, lutefisk is a whitefish that is pickled in lye until it is clear and gelatinous. Katie forewent the chance to try the delicacy, so had a double portion. Somewhat surprisingly, I didn’t hate the taste of the lutefisk, because it didn’t really have a taste and it simply adopted the taste of the sauce it was covered in, though the texture was at once chewy, viscous and slimy and overall off-putting. It feels like eating lutefisk is a Norwegian rite of passage and I am glad that I have now had it, whether or not I ever choose to order it off a menu.

Christmas at the Mall of America:

Christmas at the mall is always busy and merry with songs and lights and people bustling about shopping. But if that is a Christmas at a normal mall, what is Christmas like at the Mall of America? On the first weekend of December, after the St. Olaf Christmas Festival, we decided to head to the shopping center for a few final gifts and to glory in the commercialism of the Christmas season.

The mall was beautifully decked in shimmering silvery trees and strings of lights that decorated each floor and lit the cavernous ceilings of the open vestibules. Music filled the air from live bands playing carols and there was an excitement in the air.

We passed a storefront where children were getting photos with Santa and a fabric store with an entire wall committed, in true Minnesotan fashion, to buffalo check flannel. We had heard from our pastor at the Christmas Festival that we needed to check out a cheese shop, so we kept our eyes open for it as we hunted for our Christmas gifts.

We found the cheese shop and, after finishing our hunting, we doubled back to check out Rybicki Cheese. At the front of the store they were offering free samples of thirty or forty different cheeses as store clerks stood nearby, answering questions and encouraging people to try more samples. The cheeses were delicious and it was with regret that we realized that our holiday travel meant that we could not share the cheeses with our friends and family.

In the end, Christmas at the Mall of America was busy, but it was not the madhouse that we were expecting and we had a fun time.

Northfield Winter Walk:

The next week we celebrated Christmas with our town in the Northfield Winter Walk. The St. Olaf Christmas Festival might be the biggest event of the year for the college campus, but for the town of Northfield the Winter Walk is one of the biggest highlights of the year. For one special Thursday evening, downtown Northfield seems to transform into one of those picture-perfect small towns at Christmas that are featured on postcards and Hallmark movies. That might be partially because it is the town from a Hallmark Christmas movie.

The Hallmark classic “Like Always, Santa” is set and was filmed in downtown Northfield at Christmas. For full disclosure, I have no idea if the movie is a classic or not as I have never watched it, but it was believable that we were on a Christmas movie set as we walked along our main street. We checked out the bookstore, where there was story time going on, and the library, which was filled with people’s model trains. I ran into five other people from my Chemistry department as we ducked into shops.

We had dinner at the Contented Cow, a restaurant that derives its name from the town’s slogan: “Colleges, Cows, Contentment”. As we roamed the streets afterwards, we ran into people from our church selling concessions along the street.

We hailed a horse-drawn carriage coming down the street, climbed aboard and then took in the street as it took us around the picture-prefect town. Cold, tired and content, we headed home.

Winter at the Arb:

If we were cold at the Winter Walk, that was nothing compared to going to the Arb a few days later. Christmas light displays are beautiful and nowhere is that more true than in a garden of lights. We saw this in Denver at the Botanical Gardens, Chatfield Farms and the Denver Zoo. This year we checked out the display at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, locally known as the Arb.

Minnesota is famous for cold weather, but as we headed to the light displays we had yet to feel Minnesota at subzero temperatures. As we started to walk among the displays it was clear that we had chosen a particularly cold day to visit, but we were committed, so we soldiered on.

The lighting displays were amazing and it was a beautiful walk. Soon, however, we found that removing our hands from our pockets long enough to take pictures was not always worth the effort and we huddled into our coats and continued on.

We were fairly frozen by the time we returned to the brightly lit warm visitor center which was decorated with giant Christmas trees and towers of poinsettias. Once thawed, we agreed that it had been a great Christmas season and that we were finished. Here are photos of each of our adventures:

St. Olaf Christmas Festival

Christmas at the Mall of America

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Northfield WInter Walk

Christmas at the Arb

The Halloween Capital of the World: Attending the Anoka Halloween Parade

This is Halloween, this is Halloween. Halloween! Halloween! Halloween! Halloween!

Halloween Town is real … and it is in suburban Minneapolis. Anoka, a community near Coon Rapids north of the city, calls itself the Halloween Capital of the World. For one month of the year, the town is transformed. Over those 31 days, there are dozens of local events from masquerade balls and charity dinners to jack-o-lantern contests and trick-or-treating. Every year they have three Halloween parades with the biggest event of the month being the Grande Day Halloween Parade. It was this that brought us to Anoka.

Ahead of time we did not fully appreciate how big of an event this would be. It is a community parade, so we assumed that the best spots would be taken first thing in the morning, but if we arrived an hour before the parade began we would still be able to park a few blocks away and find a comfortable spot where we could see the parade. We were wrong.

We arrived in Champlin, right across the Mississippi from Anoka, with hours to spare before the parade, so we stopped at a barbeque restaurant for lunch (Side note: Minnesota is rightly not generally known for its barbeque, but Q Fanatic in Champlin was excellent!). By the time we left the restaurant the roads appeared to have converted into parking lots as every road was covered in traffic trying to make its way toward the parade, yet not being able to move. We joined the throng of cars and slowly edged toward the parade. It took us forty minutes to make it half a mile. At that point we hit a detour we led us down residential roads away from the downtown area and into another road closure and another detour. Another hour and several detours later we were now miles and miles away from the parade route and traffic was still slowly creeping along. We checked our clock and saw that the parade had already begun.

We eventually reached a freeway that took us to the opposite end of town where we were able to work our way to a residential neighborhood near the end of the parade route. We found parking and hiked to the main street where a crowd was expectantly waiting. We had been there for just a minute or two when people started cheering and we saw the color guard that started the parade come into view.

Much of the crowd gathered to watch the parade was in costume as were most of the people in the parade. Marching bands forewent the uniforms to have everyone march in Halloween costumes and the people riding in sports cars and firetrucks all had themed costumes. In total the parade had seventeen marching bands and many community groups that walked the parade route, though the highlight was the floats of which there were well over a hundred.

Floats carried people in all sorts of costumes sponsored by all sorts of groups from every community in the Twin Cities and everywhere within a two-hour drive. The second half of the parade was almost entirely floats advertising other local communities and their festivals that make them unique. On the back of each float was the community’s name, the name of the festival and the dates for which it was planned. Many of these dates were for May and June 2020, so I expect that the festivals were cancelled. Even Northfield was featured with its float advertising Defeat of Jesse James Days in September 2020.

After the conclusion of the parade our plan had been to make our way downtown to see all the decorations for the holiday. The surge of 50,000 people heading out of the city after the parade changed our minds, however, and we got swept up in the exiting flood and carried safely home.

It is clear that Anoka cares deeply about Halloween and that people for miles around cherish celebrating the holiday there. There will be no Grande Day Halloween Parade this fall, but that in no way changes that the town is clearly the Halloween Capitol of the World.

Touring Minneapolis: Exploring the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Mill City Museum

It is strange and exciting to show off where you live to visitors when you are living in a new area because, after all, you are still basically a visitor yourself. We know that this will soon be true of us as we move later this summer, but for now we finally feel at home and a part of a community in Minnesota.

This was not yet true last October, however, when we welcomed two groups of visitors on two consecutive weekends. The first group was my parents and their visit is the subject of this post. We had a great time with them, exploring our town of Northfield, hiking Nerstrand Big Woods State Park, walking around the Mall of America, visiting the SPAM Museum and driving to see Effigy Mounds National Monument. On top of all that, we took one day to explore the Twin Cities.

Our Minneapolis exploration took place on a grey day. My plan had been for Katie, myself and my folks to meet our family friend Michelle at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and start our tour there. I hadn’t counted on the grey sky starting to hail.

We had arrived the Gardens and we were committed to seeing them despite the inclement weather. Covered in raincoats and wrapped in scarves, we met Michelle and headed into the park. Directly ahead of us was one of Minnesota’s most recognizable landmarks: the giant sculpture of a spoon and a cherry. I am not an art critic and I do not know the deeper meaning of the cherry and what it says about the spoon or the world at large. I am not sure why the cherry seems to defy gravity as it were about the roll up and off the end of the spoon. I do not know why the spoon bridges an ornamental pond where the hailstones were regularly disturbing the surface of the water. I just know that it was enjoyable to look at and it looked memorable and iconic without looking like it was trying to do so. It framed the city in the background and it seemed like a proud symbol, even if I could not tell what it stood for.

We continued through the Sculpture Garden. The garden is a part of the nearby Walker Art Center, but did not enter the museum. Our walk took us under a tree full of windchimes that were making a lot of music in the wind, a giant bell sculpted with a rabbit on top and large colorful abstract formations. There were flowers and trees and large open areas, like the one that contained an interactive standing swing sculpture that could hold four adults.

The most striking sculpture other than the spoon and cherry was the giant blue rooster. It was easily the tallest structure in the park and it looked exactly like a rooster save for its giant size and brilliant blue color. We were allowed to get right up next to it. Like the earlier sculpture, I could not comprehend the artist’s purpose in its creation, but I was glad that it existed and that I could be in its proximity.

As the inclement weather continued, we climbed back into cars and headed out to see the rest of the city. Stop number two was the Northern Clay Center. My mom is a talented potter, so she enjoys seeing ceramic art studios and I have, by association, seen quite a few of the most famous pottery studios in America. The Northern Clay Center is one of these and going there with my mom was like going to Cape Canaveral with a fan of the Space Race or Gettysburg with a Civil War buff (As a side note, my mom is also a fan of the Space Race and a Civil War buff with whom I have gone to Cape Canaveral and Gettysburg, so I know what I’m talking about).

After the Northern Clay Center, we headed to Minnehaha Falls, a picturesque waterfall in downtown Minneapolis. Michelle had taken Katie and I to see these beautiful falls once before but on our previous visit there had been pouring rain. Now we returned in a hailstorm. The falls remained just as beautiful in the stormy weather, but we could not spend as long admiring it as it deserved before we needed to run back to the safety of our cars.

Our tour then took us to St. Anthony’s Dam. Located in downtown Minneapolis, St. Anthony’s Dam is the first dam on the Mississippi River. It can be viewed beautifully from the cantilevered Infinity Bridge of the Guthrie Theater, which we visited. First, though, we toured the old flour mill next door that was once powered by the falling water of St. Anthony’s Dam: Gold Medal Flour, now known as the Mill City Museum.

Minneapolis is historically the center of the flour milling industry in the United States and has the nickname Mill City. At one point, twenty different mills were all located at St. Anthony’s Dam including one owned by Gold Metal Flour, later renamed General Mills, and another owned by Pillsbury Flour. They would go on to become two of the largest American flour companies before they combined in 2001.

Mill City Museum is located in a burned down flour mill and it showcases the history of flour milling in Minneapolis. The tour starts in the basement where exhibits show the history of how the flour milling industry began and the lives of mill workers. Displays show old advertisements for flour and the development of icons like the Pillsbury dough boy and Betty Crocker. An operational kitchen is staffed by bakers who show samples of different types of flour and hand out samples of the fresh-baked products that they made with the different flours. An interactive water exhibits allows kids to see how rerouting rivers changes currents and can power mill wheels.

The crown jewel of the Mill City Museum, however, is the Flour Tower. After an entryway that felt eerily like the entrance to Disney’s Tower of Terror, we were ushered into one of the giant old elevators from the factory, which took us up from the basement to the floors above with about twenty other “riders”. The doors opened to show us a room behind plexi-glass that was arrayed just like it would have been when the factory was operational. As the doors opened, the lights in the room turned on and the machinery in the room started whirring. A voice in the room started explaining what would have happened on that floor of the factory when it was operational. After a few minutes, the voice stopped, the doors closed and the elevator took us to another floor, where a new scene awaited us and the voice continued its narration.

It was an inventive way to give us a tour of what would have happened on each of the dozen floors of the factory and it would have been enjoyable if not for the family in our elevator who had seen fit to bring with them on the tour a four year old who was deathly afraid of elevators. Very few words of narration were audible over the unceasing screams of the terrified child for the duration of the tour. The tour concluded on the top floor of the factory where we were let out into a sifting room where a docent explained to us the importance of air filtration in a flour plant to prevent the air from becoming explosive. We were then allowed to tour the room for ourselves and peer at the old equipment and gaze out over the city below.

Touring with my parents had not been our first time to Minnehaha Falls, St. Anthony’s Dam or the Guthrie Theater, because Michelle had showed us them when we first arrived in the area. We had not, however, gotten the chance to see the Sculpture Garden, Northern Clay Center or Mill City Museum before we saw them together with my folks. That meant that we got the joy of showing off our new city while learning more about it in the process. Below are pictures of our tour so that we can show off our city to you too.

Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

Northern Clay Center:

Minnehaha Falls:

Mill City Museum:

Large Piles of Dirt: Seeing Effigy Mounds

National parks and monuments mean a lot to Katie and I, so we make a point to see as many as we can. They have been responsible for some of the best adventures we have ever had and they are also responsible for why we found ourselves last fall in the middle of Northeastern Iowa staring at piles of dirt covered in grass that we spent hours travelling to see.

Effigy Mounds National Monument is one of two National Park Service sites in Iowa and it protects ancient Native American burial grounds. Between 600 and 1250 AD, the people living in northeastern Iowa created large mounds in which they buried their dead. They crafted the mounds to have interesting shapes when viewed from above. When I read this, I thought of the Serpent Mound in Ohio and pictured standing next to five-foot-tall mounds that would resemble sculptures made of earth. At this site there were dozens and dozens of mounds, so I reasoned the National Monument must look spectacular. I was setting myself up for disappointment.

Effigy Mounds is a long drive for us, so we redeemed the time in the car by combining it with a trip for Katie to play clarinet in a performance at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (it was a wonderful performance) and we stopped at the SPAM museum on our way (just as weird and wonderful as it sounds). We also had lunch at a brewery in a small NE Iowa town (Decorah) which happened to be the hometown of Josey Jewell, a Denver Broncos player we have followed, and the brewery had his signed jersey on display as a sign of honor for their hometown hero.

With as much planned for our day trip as we had, we had a limited amount of time at Effigy Mounds, which turned out to be more than enough. We arrived at the Visitor Center and learned about the history of the mounds and then headed out on a hiking trail to go see them. The history of the mounds is not completely known, but it is known that Native people viewed the areas a spiritually significant place and a place of peace. Many different people groups would make pilgrimages to the area. The mounds themselves encased a few graves each and were built in spiritually significant shapes, like circles, elongated circles and the shape of animals.

To see the mounds we needed to hike up a bluff to a grassy area overlooking the Mississippi River. We climbed until I excitedly announced that, according to my map, we were approaching the first significant mound. We turned the corner and…

I don’t know why I expected the mounds to be really tall, but they definitely were not. The mound was less than two feet tall and we could easily have mistaken it for part of the hill if (1) it was not marked on the map and (2) if recent caretakers had not mowed all the grass except that on the mound to make its outline visible.

We continued to more mounds, but none were much more pronounced than the first one. Even named mounds like “Little Bear” and “Big Bear” were barely visible piles of dirt camouflaged with layers of grass. Their shapes, while vaguely multi-legged, could only be properly distinguished from the air, a vantage point that we did not have. Was it impressive that these were built a thousand years ago? Absolutely. Was it worthwhile to see these structures in person? Not so much.

The family was disappointed and I was frustrated for planning such a fruitless trip when something hit me. Like, literally. Something hit me. It was a tree branch from one of the large trees far overhead and a gust of wind had dislodged it. I was preoccupied with my thoughts and I was looking down the path when I felt a sharp pain on my scalp and a force that caused me to lose my balance and fall flat on my back. The branch bounced up off my head and landed next to where I fell.

It felt like a cruel irony and I began anthropomorphizing the stick and trying to ascribe it a motivation. Was it offended that I was not impressed by the ancient structures? Or was it frustrated that I had not done sufficient research ahead of time so that I would know what to expect? I became preoccupied with discovering the motivation of the stick’s attack until I realized that I would need to pay attention to where I was going if I wanted to avoid other potentially attacking trees.

We love National Parks and Monuments and we have since completed all NPS sites in Iowa, so we are grateful to have visited Effigy Mounds, but we cannot truly endorse the park to other visitors. That is, unless those visitors are big fans of large piles of dirt and dive-bombing tree branches.

Autumn in Minnesota: Our Apple Picking Adventure

There is nothing that makes me more at home than the feel of a cool autumn breeze as it brings smells of apple cider and pumpkin pie. I love the fall! I missed fall in Colorado where eight months of warmth and sun immediately transition to four months of cold and snow…and sun. Later this summer we will be moving to South Carolina, where there is also too much warmth for a true autumn like I grew up with in New York. Minnesota, however, is not lacking for cold days and Katie and I savored the autumn we had here. And when it comes to autumn activities, there is one for which Minnesota is especially famous: apple picking.

As you may or may not know, the types of apples that you can buy at the store are specifically cultivated to have a particular crispness, color and tartness. The varieties of apples are trademarked and each can trace its origin to a particular orchard and people who specifically cross-pollinated certain apple trees to create the particular characteristics of the apple variety. Most commercially available apple varieties in the US were created by the scientists at the University of Minnesota, including the local favorite: the honeycrisp. We learned a lot about apple varieties when we visited the opening of a local orchard, but we truly experienced it when we went apple picking ourselves.

There are a few local orchards where you can pick your own apples, so we visited one last autumn (because what’s the point of going to an orchard if you can’t pick the apples yourself, am I right?) We parked in a field ringed with haybales and made our way to the barn where there were check-out lanes and empty bushel baskets. Someone wearing an apron and a nametag offered us samples of different apples and explained to us the unique taste profile of each. She then gestured us toward a map and a bushel basket.

This was peak apple picking season and we were far from alone in the orchard. Based on parking lot, I would have guessed there were several dozen families there with us, though the orchard was big enough that we did not see many people as soon as we headed into the rows of apple trees.

Almost half the orchard was filled with honeycrisp apple trees. As these were our main target, we walked along the rows of trees until we found a row that did not appear to have been extensively picked over. The apples were simply beautiful and we easily filled a bushel basket full of only flawless-looking specimens. We continued on and hunted down a couple fuji and gala apples to join our bushel of honeycrisps.

On our way back, we found a corn maze (or “maize maze” if you prefer) and we set down our apples and headed into the maze. It was an interactive maze with a trivia component where trivia questions helped give you hints that led you through the maze. We may not have had the classic TV show knowledge to successfully answer all the questions, but we do know mazes. Based on the maze, we worked backward and and were able to solve the trivia questions.

Picking our apples up again at the other end of the maze, we headed to check out. The apples we gathered ended up making pies, crisps, applesauce and apple butter. And, of course, just plain apples. And by “just plain apples” I mean “mouth-watering, delicious, crisp, juicy apples that had the perfect crunch and so much juice that it trickled down your chin”. You know, just plain apples.

Minnesota has a pretty awesome autumnal season and we enjoyed our time in it. That said, the internet tells me that the South has apple picking in the fall even if the autumn is not as cold as Minnesota. In fact, I have found apple orchards not far from where we will be living, meaning that we do not need to stop picking delicious apples and eating the delicious rewards.

How ‘bout them apples?

Um Yah Yah: Watching the Cereal Bowl

Sports are characterized by the great rivalries: the Yankees vs. the Red Sox, Georgia vs. Alabama, the Packers vs. the Bears, and the St. Olaf Oles vs. the Carleton College Carls. Okay, the Ole vs. Carl rivalry might not be world famous, but it is a bit of a big deal when you live in a tiny Minnesota town that is home to two small Minnesota colleges.

Northfield is a small town in rural Minnesota. The sign when you enter town says “Colleges. Cows. Contentment.” It refers to the fact that this small town in dairy country is home to two well-respected small liberal arts colleges: Carleton College and St. Olaf College. The colleges lie on either side of the Cannon River and are similar enough in size to compete against one another in athletics.

Other than the two colleges, the biggest employer in town is the cereal company Malt-o-Meal, who has a factory that lies between the two campuses. When a breeze blows through town, it carries aromas of honey, maple or baked oats depending on what is baking that day. In honor of Malt-o-Meal, the annual football game between St. Olaf and Carleton is known as the “Cereal Bowl”.

Both colleges are far more known for their academics and arts programs than for athletics, but the Cereal Bowl is the one day a year where homework is left in dorm rooms and students rush out of choice rehearsals to fill the bleachers and cheer on their alma mater.

When the game rolled around last year, I had been a professor at St. Olaf College for only a few weeks. In getting to know the students in my classes, however, I had realized that several of them were football players, so I came to the game to show my support. I was also intrigued by the St. Olaf fight song and was excited to hear it sung.

Most fight songs are written either in cut time (2/2) or common time (4/4), but there is one exception: one college who chose for some inexplicable reason to write their fight song in the form of a polka in 3/4 time, St. Olaf College. I had found the song when I was first hired and had it memorized long before I moved to the state. It goes:

“We come from St. Olaf / We sure are the real stuff / Our team is the cream of the colleges great / We fight fast and furious / Our team is injurious / Tonight Carleton College will sure meet its fate

“Um! Yah! Yah! / Um! Yah! Yah! / Um! Yah! Yah! / Um! Yah! Yah! / Um! Yah! Yah! / Um! Yah! Yah! / Um! Yah! Yah! Yah!

“Um! Yah! Yah! / Um! Yah! Yah! / Um! Yah! Yah! / Um! Yah! Yah! / Um! Yah! Yah! / Um! Yah! Yah! / Um! Yah! Yah! Yah!”

Imagine a Bavarian drinking song accompanying the oom pah pahs of a tuba to get a feel for the tune. You can also see from the lyrics that it really is most relevant on the day that the Oles face Carleton College.

The fight song was sung by the all the students, alumni, parents and guests every time St. Olaf scored and there were plenty of opportunities to sing. After a slow start, St. Olaf offense began to effectively drive the ball down the field over and over and it soon became clear that our football team played a higher caliber game than their opponents.

This was clear to the Carleton fans too, who ceased cheering for their football team and started chanting “Safety School” to mock St. Olaf College students’ lower SAT scores. They also distributed T-shirts bearing the St. Olaf crest surrounded by the words “St. Olaf Community College” and “At least you got in somewhere…”

The lopsided game continued and the jeers from the Carleton stands were drowned by chorus and chorus of Um! Yah! Yah! The game ended with a St. Olaf victory. I was proud of my students and was happy to be there representing St. Olaf when, as the song said, Carleton College sure met its fate.