![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
As people who like to ride bikes know, an organized bicycle tour is one of the great deals of vacation travel.
Why pay big bucks to an "adventure'' outfitter when you can join a local tour for very little? You could pay Timberline Adventures of Denver $1,800 for its tour of Missouri's Katy Trail — or you could pay Missouri state parks $250 for the same thing, albeit with accommodations in tents, not hotels.
For anyone who's reasonably fit, bike tours are the best possible way to see the countryside, and sponsors do everything for participants except pedal and set up tents.
Chicago is on a roll. Its Millennium Park is wildly popular, it's been crowned the western White House and it hopes to land the
2016 Olympics.
But long before Barack Obama made Chicago cool by association, people had noticed that it's a whole lot of fun. These days,
tourists have to compete with hordes of conventioneers and suburbanites fleeing back to the city. Prices, of course, have gone
up.
But Chicago is a populist town, and there's lots to do for free. Here are 10 tips for making a trip affordable.
1. Go when business people and vacationers don't. Hotels are cheapest in Chicago on the week before Christmas and in the depths of winter. I've also gotten very good deals on the long Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends and in late October (avoid the Chicago Marathon in mid-October).
Until recently, my memories of college dorms mostly involved sloppy drunks, sloppier roommates and a bathroom shared by the whole floor.
Then my husband and I stayed at Marquette University in Milwaukee. It was as quiet as a cathedral, and we had a private bath and a panoramic view of the city from our 17th-floor picture windows.
We paid $28 apiece, which was nice because we like to save money. But mostly, we stayed at Marquette because it was so convenient, three blocks from the special bus that takes summer visitors to the lakefront Henry Maier Festival Park and right on the route that takes baseball fans to Miller Park on game days. We also brought our bikes, and we knew we could bring them up to our room — at a college, nobody bats an eye about that.
For people who love the outdoors, luxury is in the eye of the beholder.
Is it a Jacuzzi or a latrine? A four-course breakfast or a fire ring?
The answer is not so obvious. If the choice also includes starry skies, silence and snow-laden pines, many folks would take a camper cabin over a fancy inn, even if they have to use vault toilets and cook over a fire.
In Kandiyohi County, it's thanks to the last Ice Age that life's a beach today.
Near Willmar, a lobe of the last glacier came to a grinding halt 12,000 years ago, dumping massive blocks of ice that made big dents in the ground.
Now, they're lakes, popping up like mirages at the edge of soybean fields, behind screens of ash and cottonwoods. Farther north, they're hidden amid rocky meadows and rolling hillocks full of glacial rubble.