![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
Along the shores of Lake Pepin, villages like to play a game called “Tempt the Tourist.’’
The tourists think they’re going to go for a drive and see some scenery. But the villages give them so many places to indulge themselves, they end up mostly eating and shopping — not that anyone’s complaining.
The highway around Lake Pepin is a gantlet of temptations — bakeries, bistros, wine bars and gift shops. Some people never make it beyond Stockholm or Red Wing. But this is the kind of place where it’s fun to spin your wheels.
A small Red Wing Stoneware sponge bowl, $550. A beat-up pie safe, $795. A shaky coat rack with two broken brackets, $80.
Well, I'm not an expert on antiques. But an empty can of Heet antifreeze for $4?
My friend Andi and I stood contemplating this sight.
For a river town that has everything going for it, Winona is a little hard for a tourist to get to know.
Those who venture off U.S. 61 find a downtown that's long, spread out and a little forlorn on weekends. To find its Mississippi riverfront, they have to cut across train tracks and around a concrete levee wall.
For 50 years, a paddlewheeler sat atop the riverbank, serving as museum, event center and gathering spot. The Julius C. Wilkie
was only a replica of a steamboat, but it served as city icon and festival namesake, so when the rotting structure was
demolished in 2008, it left a dent in the city's identity.
Skiers have a hard time figuring out Mother Nature.
It's supposed to snow across central and northern Minnesota and Wisconson, but in the last few years, many storms have veered to the south instead. It's odd, but what can you do? You have to go with the snow.
One year, at the end of February, my friend Becky and I were just about to make the long drive to the snowy Upper Peninsula of Michigan when the southeast Minnesota town of Winona got blanketed with 30 inches.
Benjamin Franklin was a wise man, but he was way off base when he proposed the turkey as a national symbol instead of the eagle.
Why? Because bald eagles are the perfect Americans. They're large, brash, opportunistic and easy to identify. And wherever they go, money follows.
Not long after the pesticide DDT was banned in 1972, bald eagle populations began to bounce back in the lower 48 states. Eagles were hard to spot in the summer, when they spread out over the north woods of Minnesota and Wisconsin, but in the winter, they'd gather to fish in the open water beneath dams or at the mouths of large rivers.
There are a lot of good views in the world — from observation towers, skyscrapers, bluff-top parks.
But the best view always is the one you can admire from your own room.
Many places in the Upper Midwest have a lovely window on the world — cabins on lakes, hotels on rivers, B&Bs in the bluffs. But some rise above the others, often literally.
Once, people went through hell to get to Stockholm, Wis.
It's different nowadays. It's only a joy ride away from the Twin Cities, and the streets of this pretty hamlet on Lake Pepin are lined with sports cars and motorcycles on weekends. There are shops, galleries, inns, a pub; it's the place to go for a room with a view or vroom with a brew.
In 1854, this bit of land at the foot of the Mississippi bluffs was the destination of more than 200 emigrants from the impoverished village of Bjurtjärn, Sweden. Promised "paradise on earth," they instead endured cholera, deprivation and betrayal.
For people who love nature, winter is a time of opportunity.
When it's cold enough, you can walk onto the Mississippi River. You can see bald eagles up close. You can explore sloughs and backwaters without being eaten alive by insects.
"Most of these places, you'd almost die in a few minutes in summer," says Scott Mehus, education specialist at the National Eagle Center in Wabasha. "So now is a good time to get out there and see things."
In southeast Minnesota, along the Mississippi and in its bluffs, fans of folk music and the blues will realize they're really
into country.
Country as in friendly and down-home. Country as in far from the bright lights and big city.
Out in the countryside, music sounds different. In an old general store in Oak Center, it's toasty warm, like late-afternoon sunlight. In the airy loft above a harp-building workshop near Red Wing, it rings out like a church bell on Sunday morning. And in Zumbrota, at the smallest Carnegie library in the state, it's just really, really close.
In the sloughs around Alma, birds of a feather flock together.
Bird-watchers, especially. On chilly days in late fall, they crowd onto a wooden platform to watch tundra swans paddling around a slough of the Buffalo River called Rieck’s Lake.
For years, this lake provided an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord for tundra swans, a big bird that needs a lot of fuel for its flight from the Arctic Circle to the marshes of Chesapeake Bay.
We'd been in La Crosse for barely an hour, and everyone we'd met was a certified character.
In Riverside Park, Frank and Faith Rimmert and Jonathan and Barb Rimmert were decked out in top hats, waistcoats and crinolines to meet the Mississippi Queen paddlewheeler, portraying the 19th-century locals who would have assembled.
"If your relatives were coming for a visit, you'd come to greet them," said Faith Rimmert, a volunteer for the La Crosse County Historical Society. "People picked up things being shipped in, or maybe you'd be looking for a servant — you'd say, 'I want that person for a servant in my house.'"
It's easy to speed right through the river town of Fountain City, on the way to someplace else, but that would be a mistake.
In Fountain City, all is not as it seems. A Hindu temple sits amid hay fields. One of the world's largest collections of toy pedal cars occupies five barns on a bluff. Dreamlike Santas ride fish in a riverfront studio, models for copies sold around the nation.
On this seemingly ordinary stretch of the Mississippi, people have been inspired by . . . something. Perhaps it's the dramatic bluffs that loom above town. One morning in 1995, they sent a 55-ton boulder slamming into a house, which, overnight, became a tourist attraction. That's the kind of thing that makes a person look twice at his surroundings.
For centuries, blufftop views of the Mississippi have inspired superlatives.
Jonathan Carver called the view from Barn Bluff "the most beautiful prospect that imagination can form.'' Stephen Long said, "The sublime and beautiful (are) here blended in the most enchanting manner.''
Those early explorers embellished their speech to impress folks back home. Nowadays, most people who take in the scenery just say "Wow.''
Deep down, every morel hunter believes in divine providence.
There's nothing so providential as baskets overflowing with morels, and the taste is so divine hunters dream about it all winter. In spring, they offer a fervent prayer to the mushroom gods: May the fungus be among us.
Morels do taste heavenly. But it's the hunt that's so addictive, not the mushroom itself. For one thing, it's fun to find something for free that's so expensive in stores and restaurants, and it's fun to beat the odds by finding something so notoriously elusive.
Along the Mississippi River, the fortunes of Wabasha have risen right along with the once-endangered bald eagle.
Eagles reappeared slowly after DDT was banned in 1972, and one of the first places they could be seen was in this Minnesota town, just downriver from the mouth of the Chippewa River, which kept water open in winter so eagles could fish.
The city built a deck downtown and staffed it with spotting scopes and volunteers from November through March. Then it started a makeshift eagle center behind an empty storefront. In 2007, it opened the National Eagle Center in a handsome brick building on the river banks.
All kinds of paths cross in the Wisconsin village of Trempealeau.
Canoes and cormorants, tugboats and trains, bicyclists and blues fans all are drawn toward this Mississippi River town. It’s just a little burg, but it’s smack in the middle of Mother Nature’s playground.
Perrot State Park starts at the end of Trempealeau’s First Street, with hiking trails that give vistors spectacular views of far-off Winona, the river valley and a hill French explorers called La Montagne Qui Trempe a l'Eau, or "the mountain that soaks in the water.'' To the north are the sloughs of Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge, crossroads for birds and springboard for bicyclists.
In 1805, while Lewis and Clark were making history on the Missouri River, another explorer was heading up the Mississippi.
Sent by a general who was a double agent for Spain, 26-year-old Lt. Zebulon Pike was assigned to find sites for forts, determine the source of the Mississippi, make peace between warring tribes and stop unlicensed British trade on land just acquired by the Americans.
He did find a fort site on 500-foot bluffs in Iowa, but it was scrapped for a more practical site across the river in Prairie du Chien, Wis. He found the site that became Fort Snelling, though it already was well known to traders. He identified Leech Lake — as the source of the Mississippi.
The pelicans and cormorants of the Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge are used to train whistles and the distant popping of trap guns. But they're even more used to the whir of bicycle gears.
Each fall, birds and bicyclists migrate to the same place along the Mississippi River in Wisconsin. Here, the 24-mile Great River State Trail starts in the refuge, skirts Perrot State Park and goes through the river town of Trempealeau before entering the Upper Mississippi River Wildlife and Fish Refuge and then the prairie outside Onalaska.
Onalaska, just north of La Crosse, grew up around a lumber mill and today is where the citizens of its hemmed-in sister city come to dine, shop and fish.
