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If your thoughts turn to beer and oompah music in fall, the southern Minnesota town of New Ulm is the place for you.
New Ulm is the state's most German town, and this month, its brewery celebrates its 150th anniversary. Schell is the second-oldest family-run brewery in the nation and possibly the most picturesque, on a wooded hillside adjoining a state park.
What to do: Tour Schell Brewery (pictured). Hike on 8½ miles of trails in Flandrau State Park. Bicycle a five-mile paved path through town. Shop at Domeier's German Store and downtown. Watch the figures of the Glockenspiel twirl. Visit Morgan Creek Vineyards in the country.
Events to catch: Sept. 17-18, August Schell Brewery's 150th Schellabration. Oct. 2, Cambria Crush Grape Stomp at Morgan Creek Vineyards. Oct. 1-2 and 8-9, Oktoberfest at the Holiday Inn.
Where to stay: On German Street, the Bohemian or Deutsche Strasse bed and breakfasts.
Details: See Where the Germans are.
Past fast plans: Exploring the Porkies, Quirky McGregor, Swiss in New Glarus, Sample La Crosse, The world in Winnipeg
Defeat of Jesse James Days in Northfield, Minn. There's a riverfront fine-arts festival, rodeo and Saturday bike tour in this town, a hour south of the Twin Cities, but don't miss the re-enactments of the famous bank raid. Sept. 8-12.
Villa Louis Carriage Classic in Prairie du Chien, Wis. The Victorian estate on the Mississippi River hosts horses, restored carriages and drivers in period dress for competitive arena and cross-country sport driving, a passion of the frontier aristocrats who built it. Sept. 11-12.
Pufferbilly Days in Boone, Iowa. This festival in central Iowa, just west of Ames, is named for a steam engine and features a spike-driving contest, parachute jumps, mud volleyball and rides on the Boone and Scenic Valley Railroad. A parade is 9:30 a.m. Saturday. Sept. 9-12.
Michigan Schooner Festival in Traverse City, Mich. Seven tall ships converge on this Lake Michigan town for a festival that starts with a grand parade of sail and includes tours, sailings, music and pirate re-enactments. Sept. 10-12.
During harvest time in a vineyard, turning purple has nothing to do with the Minnesota Vikings.
Purple is what you'll be if you get into a wooden tub of grapes and try to turn them into juice with your bare feet. Vineyards don't get their juice that way anymore, but many still offer a grape stomp, and there's nothing goofier to do on an autumn day.
There are prizes for those who extract the most juice and those who show the most "style,'' so wearing a creative costume helps. And some grape stomps feature an "I Love Lucy'' look-alike contest, in tribute to the famous 1956 episode in which the comedienne takes a job in an Italian vineyard and, of course, makes a mess of things.
Most stomps require
contestants to pre-register and pay a small fee. Everyone gets to
sample wine, eat and listen to live music. Here are grape stomps for 2010.
By the start of September, temperatures cool down and everyone starts thinking the same thing: Time to plan a weekend bike trip.
Autumn
is a great time to try out a new bike trail, not only because of fall
colors and invigorating weather but because so many small towns throw
harvest festivals in September and October.
Since trails go right through towns, bicycle tourists are right in the middle of the action.
Food always is the main draw, and there's nothing bicyclists like more than food. Grape harvests result in wine festivals and Oktoberfests in a river of beer; that goes over pretty well, too.
So why not pair a bike ride with a fun little festival? Here are great fests in 2010.
Fall is the busiest travel season of the year — we all know the nice days are numbered, and we're going to try our damnedest to make them count.
But with pretty much everyone heading out to look for fall color, especially on weekends, there are very few bargains.
That's why those of us on a budget look to our old friends: the state parks, the mom-and-pop motels, the environmental centers, the hostels, the outdoors clubs.
Sign up for those deals, and you'll be enjoying fall in all the best places: Minnesota bluff country, the edge of the Boundary Waters, Wisconsin's Ice Age Trail, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the Mississippi River Valley in northeast Iowa, even the popular North Shore.
Here are 15 great autumn trips for $100 or less per person, based on two. Needless to say, now is the time to reserve.
Americans have a love-hate relationship with their tourist traps. They’re so uncool . . . but so irresistible.
What makes something a tourist trap? It’s a place that’s so cheesy you have to see if it’s really as cheesy as it looks. A place so iconic you’ve seen a million pictures of it. A place plugged by thousands of highway billboards.
Mostly, it’s a place everyone else has seen — so you have to, too. We can’t help ourselves, especially when it comes to anything that’s odd or oversized.
And why not? Few tourist traps have no redeeming qualities at all, and most actually are pretty cool — or so you’ll think afterward, once the headache fades (I’m talking about you, House on the Rock).
Here are 10 tourists traps that might make you roll your eyes but still are worth a visit.
Even tourists from the great European capitals are impressed by Summit Avenue.
It's not just one mansion, but one after another, all the way from the Mississippi River to the massive Cathedral of St. Paul, overlooking downtown and the state Capitol.
This five-mile stretch is one of the most splendid, best-preserved Victorian streets in the United States. The oldest are at the east end, on the lip of the bluff overlooking downtown and the Mississippi River.
The richest man in Minnesota built his home there, a 36,000-square-foot Richardsonian Romanesque mansion of red sandstone, with 13 bathrooms and 22 fireplaces.
Today, the James J. Hill House is owned by the Minnesota Historical Society, which gives tours of the 1891 house and walking tours past other mansions built with the spoils of the Gilded Age.
"It was a time when people wanted to spend a lot of money if they had it,'' said guide Joanne Dolney.
It's one thing to gawk at the mansions from the sidewalk, as passersby do year-round. With such elaborate ornamentation on the outside, what could the insides be like?
You can find out Sept. 12 on the Summit Hill House Tour, when 13 historic homes will open to the public, including seven on Summit Avenue.
In this part of the world, fall is sweet, but way too short.
All of the quaint little towns along rivers and in the bluffs have to pack their autumn festivals into the same six weekends, rolling out parades, pumpkin contests and oompah bands for all the leaf-peeping tourists.
The
choices are paralyzing. Flea market or scarecrow contest? Pumpkin regatta or studio tour? Yodeling contest or dachshund races?
You can't do it all, but you can do a lot. Just go on a power trip — to two, even three festivals in one day.
Here's a guide to the best places to be each weekend if you want to cram in as many fall festivities as possible before cold weather arrives.
To plan more power tripping, just go to local events calendars. The ones for Wisconsin and Minnesota allow you to plug in a place, a date and the radius within which you want to travel. For Iowa and Illinois, you can type in a region. In Michigan, select a date and town and you'll see festivals nearby.
For more festivals by weekend, see our Events Calendar.
This time of year, everyone in Minnesota starts thinking about going to the North Shore, and everyone wants that perfect place to stay.
I first went to the North Shore 30 years ago this month, without a reservation (you can’t do that anymore), and lucked into Fern Creek cabin (pictured) at Koeneke’s Shoredge resort, just beyond Lutsen.
It had hand-sewn curtains, a tiny kitchen and tiny bedrooms with walls that didn’t quite go up to the ceiling. But it was surrounded by poplars and had a picture window facing the lake, a swing out front and a rocky shoreline perfect for bonfires.
That's my idea of a perfect place to stay, though I know it's not everyone's. I stopped by recently and caught Karen Bergly of Plymouth, Minn., whose mother’s family has been running the summer-only resort since 1953.
“There’s no TV and no Internet; this is your rustic getaway place,’’ she said. “You commune with the lake.’’
The resort still fills, but small, family-run resorts like Koeneke’s are disappearing fast.
To children, the breakwall of Grand Marais’ harbor is one big amusement park.
I watched in fascination as a barefoot 3-year-old in diapers zoomed from one jagged outcropping to another, scrambling up a chest-high cleft in the rock to follow her 6-year-old sister along a lichen-covered ridge.
“They climb anything and everything,’’ their mother said, smiling.
Ian and Jill Jenkinson of Adelaide, Australia, had ventured south of the border from Thunder Bay, where they spent a year on a teacher exchange. Their 8-year-old son also was running full-bore along the rocky shoreline.
“Where we live, it’s all sand, so these pebbles and rocks are fascinating,’’ Ian Jenkinson said. “We’ve been to the Mall of America and Disney World, places where they’re excited to be, of course, but realistically, I think they’re having more fun here.’’
In the straits between lakes Michigan and Huron, you can find more than one Mackinac Island.
The best-known first was advertised as “the Fairy Isle of Mackinac’’ and is not quite rooted in reality. It has a tuxedo shop but no hardware store, a Victorian house called Brigadoon and a fan club that gathers every October in vintage clothing to revere the year 1912.
You get to that island in a horse-drawn surrey, driven by a liveryman in a top hat.
Then there's the day-tripper island, chockablock with ice-cream and fudge shops. You see that one from wagons on tours narrated by college students.
And there’s the island we saw, on bicycles with backpacks. From the bemused look on the ferryman's face, we gathered that not many folks go to this famous island with belongings on their backs.
Luckily for us, Mackinac is not a snobbish place.
Sure, we got shooed away from the Grand Hotel by a young woman who stood under an umbrella like Mary Poppins but looked much less friendly. But the locals are so outnumbered by the tourists — by a ratio of 600 to a million — that no one gets too hoity-toity.
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