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In the north woods, ticks are thick this year. Here's an ingenious idea from Border Route Trail founder Ed Solstad of Minneapolis, who credits a Panamanian tour guide:
"Wrap a strip of duct tape, sticky side out, around your cuffs to keep ticks from crawling up your legs and arms. I also wrapped duct tape around my collar as a last line of defense to try to keep them out of my hair. We tried this last year and it worked quite well. I had an impressive collection at the end of the day.'' For more, see Preventing Lyme disease.
In the north woods, ticks are thick this year. Here's an ingenious idea from Border Route Trail founder Ed Solstad of Minneapolis, who credits a Panamanian tour guide:
"Wrap a strip of duct tape, sticky side out, around your cuffs to keep ticks from crawling up your legs and arms. I also wrapped duct tape around my collar as a last line of defense to try to keep them out of my hair. We tried this last year and it worked quite well. I had an impressive collection at the end of the day.'' For more, see Preventing Lyme disease.
In Wisconsin, the best guide to bicycling is free.
Destination bicycling began in Wisconsin, which became the pioneer of rail trails when it opened the Elroy-Sparta State Trail in 1967. It's still the leader, and every year, it gives away 50,000 to 75,000 copies of its excellent Wisconsin Biking Guides.
All across the Upper Midwest, the message boards are buzzing: Where are they?
According to the Iowa guestbook at Morels.com, they're plentiful in northeast Iowa if you know where to look, which always is the tricky part. They're in southern Wisconsin, too: "It seemed that every tree we looked under there were morels!'' But most Minnesotans still are waiting.
In southeast Minnesota and southwest Wisconsin, shady forests and sunny hillsides are erupting in spring blooms.
The varied terrain of bluff country provides the region's best and widest array of wildflowers, all within a 50-mile radius. Here's a mid-May road trip on which you can see them all.
There's something unusual about Wisconsin — but no one knows what.
In the middle of the last century, ordinary people began populating the roadsides with figures of concrete and glass. A former
lumberjack created 203 of them next to his northwoods tavern, including Paul Bunyan, Sacajawea and the whole Budweiser
Clydesdale team.
In summer, only the foolhardy travel without reservations.
Big events can eat up every room and campsite in an entire region, especially if the event is in a small town — say, the
central Wisconsin town of Iola, which has a population of only 1,300 but will bring 135,000 people to its Iola Old Car Show July 10-13, 2008.
Planning to check out Lake Pepin's 100-Mile Garage Sale this weekend? Stop in Wabasha to try out a new destination restaurant, Vinifera. It opens Saturday in the riverfront space once occupied by Nosh, which decamped to Lake City a year ago.
Michael Murray-John, most recently chef at Seven Pines Lodge in western Wisconsin, is featuring a wine bar and a retail shop in which guests can purchase bottles and consume them on the spot with small plates of Mediterranean comfort food — coq au vin, braised lamb shanks, steamed mussels — selling for $6-$15.
If you're trying to get a tourist's attention these days, it's apparently not enough to brag about your pristine lakes and fragrant forests.
Ontario is giving away the seven-day
Great Ontario Outdoor Adventure of a Lifetime, worth $12,500, including air fare to and from Thunder Bay in August. Also
included: a charter sailboat tour, a float-plane wilderness flight, a visit to Fort William Historical Park (pictured), Nikon
cameras and binoculars and a hiking, paddling and camping adventure with renowned Canadian photographers Joanie and Gary
McGuffin. Enter through May 31.
In summer, bicycle tours are a dime a dozen.
But Minnesota's Lake City has launched one with a novel concept: On the 32-mile route of its new Tour de Pepin, bicyclists return on the Pearl of the Lake paddlewheeler.
If you've ever wondered what it'd be like to ride in a covered wagon, now is the time to find out.
A real wagon train, rolling along on clattering wooden wheels and pulled by horses, is leaving from Cannon Falls on Sunday, May 4, for an eight-day trip to the State Capitol in St. Paul. And you're invited.
In spring, people who are willing to get dirty can earn their keep at a favorite inn.
The Minnesota Rovers Outdoors Club is heading for Minnesota's Gunflint Trail April 25-28 to work on the Border Route Trail, and participants will be spending three nights at
the Gunflint Lodge for a tax-deductible $70. Volunteers needn't be members.
The harbingers of spring are on the move.
"The spring migration is well underway!'' reports Crex Meadows refuge, in northwest Wisconsin near Grantsburg. "Eagles and swans, Canada geese, robins, sparrows, sandhills cranes have arrived!''
In Mexico, few vacationing Midwesterners overlook the beach. But they may overlook something just as nice.
Mexico has beach resorts, but it also has B&Bs — lots of them. They were there long before high-rise, all-inclusive, American-style resorts brought in crowds of sun-starved Midwesterners on package tours.
Andrew Slade of Duluth has camped in 27 states and five provinces and is the author of the new "Camping the North Shore''
(There and Back Books, $14.95). His book includes descriptions of campsites on inland lakes and rivers as well as Lake Superior
and suggestions on what to do while there: swim the Baptism River, hike the "Lake District,'' paddle Crescent Lake. If you'd
like to try something new on the North Shore, this is the book to have.
"Camping is the best way to experience the North Shore," Slade says. Here are his top five campsites for North Shore adventures:
In high-school, some of us were jocks. Some of us weren't but wanted to be. Now, we're too old, too out-of-shape, too rusty.
Or are we? As any trainer will tell you, “The race belongs not just to the swift and strong, but to those who keep running.’’