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There are thousands of lakes in the north woods, but the most famous one is a stone's throw from Illinois.
Lake Geneva has been the favorite retreat of Chicago folks for 150 years, and everybody who was anybody had a place there: the Wrigleys, Maytags and Schwinns, but also cartoonists, actors, brewers and bottle-cap makers.
To know Thunder Bay is to love Thunder Bay.
Lake Superior's largest town is hard to get to know, though, in part because it was two towns until 1970. No downtown pops out of the landscape; people driving through see only the flat sprawl of Fort William, then the hillier sprawl of Port Arthur.
But Thunder Bay's surroundings are spectacular: Mount McKay on the south, Kakabeka Falls to the west and Ouimet and Eagle canyons to the north.
After more than 150 years, this Minnesota river town's unrefined early days are history.
Once, legions of unkempt lumberjacks mobbed the streets of Stillwater, spending their wages at saloons and bordellos. Now, mobs of weekend tourists roam through town, sipping cappuccinos, sampling wine and shopping for gifts and antiques.
Stillwater has come a long way since the days when King Pine ruled. Reminders of the era are everywhere, however, in mills that now house antiques malls and splendid Victorian houses. Many of the lumber barons' houses now are bed-and-breakfasts and still carry their names — Bean, Mulvey, Sauntry, Staples. But a walk along any Stillwater street will yield a bumper crop of other painted ladies, complete with turrets, cupolas, gables and wrap-around porches.
Copper Harbor, Mich., never has had an easy existence.
Indians and explorers always knew there was copper sitting along the Keweenaw Peninsula. But the desolation of the area made mining difficult; the earliest expedition, sent by London investors in 1771, gave up in disgust on an area Patrick Henry told Congress was "beyond the most distant wilderness and remote as the moon.''
Lower Michigan had to be persuaded to take the Keweenaw and the rest of the Upper Peninsula in 1836, when it was applying for statehood. One opponent complained that the area, separated from Detroit by Lake Michigan and nearly 600 miles, was nothing but "20,000 square miles of howling wilderness.''
People converge on Spring Green, Wis., for many good reasons: To admire Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces. To hear Shakespeare at American Players Theatre. To see world-class kitsch at House on the Rock.
But what brought me to Spring Green? Free stuff.
Spring Green calls itself "The Birthday Town,'' because people celebrating birthdays can go around to its businesses collecting free loot, like trick-or-treaters. It's like having another holiday, except you're the only one who gets to celebrate it.
Of all the immigrant groups, Norwegians perhaps are most sentimental.
They settled in hills and valleys reminiscent of their homeland, bringing trunks full of handcrafted ale bowls and mangle boards. Generations later, they’re still painting bowls and stitching costumes in the old style and celebrating holidays with foods poor Norwegians ate in the 19th century.
The heart of this nostalgia is Decorah, a town of 8,500 tucked into the wooded ridges and limestone bluffs of northeast Iowa. It's the home of Luther College, established by Norwegians in 1861, and Vesterheim, founded in 1877 and now the nation's most comprehensive museum dedicated to a single ethnic group.
It took plenty of sisu to settle Embarrass.
It's the consistently coldest spot in the Lower 48; arctic blasts blow up against the Laurentian Divide and pool over the township, which set a record of 64 below in 1996. The soil is poor, allowing farmers to do little more than grow potatoes and raise a few cows.
The very word Embarrass is French for obstacle, and comes from French voyageurs' opinion of the local river: curvy as a corkscrew and usually too low to navigate.
It's obvious from one look at the shop-lined streets of Amana, the largest of the seven Amana Colonies, that modern commerce is in full flower there. Even so, the first question asked about the villages is: Are the Amana people Amish?
And no wonder — the people of the Amanas spoke German, lived simply and adhered faithfully to Scripture. Many still do. But no, they never were Amish.
The first people of the Amanas were German immigrants who came to Iowa in 1855. They were devoutly religious, as were many of the time, but in addition they believed in Inspirationism — that God speaks to modern-day people through chosen Werkzeuge, the German word for tools, rather than ordained ministers. The name they gave their Iowa settlement, Amana, comes from the Bible and means "remain true.''
Since its earliest days, the people of Mineral Point have created beauty out of nothing.
Lead first drew eager frontiersmen, who often lived in the "badger holes'' they dug in their search for "mineral.'' The territory later became known as the badger state, and the town became Mineral Point, the nucleus around which Wisconsin developed.
In the early 1830s, skilled miners began arriving from Cornwall, on the rocky western tip of England. They also were expert stonemasons, and they chipped blocks of golden limestone out of the ground and fashioned handsome little cottages that resembled those of their homeland.
There are many colossal lumberjacks, voyageurs and Indian chiefs scattered around Minnesota, all paying tribute to a colorful past.
But there's only one Big Ole.
He stands at the end of Alexandria's Broadway Street, 28 feet of glowering Viking, brandishing a spear and clutching a glistening silver shield that reads "Alexandria, Birthplace of America.''
If it wasn't for the climate, Peter Pan would feel right at home in Madison, Wis.
It's the NeverNeverland of the Midwest, a town whose zany exuberance is appreciated by everyone but Republicans, whose
outnumbered governor once called it "57 square miles surrounded by reality.''
To most people, Superior, Wis., is nothing more than a series of traffic lights to endure on the fast track to the Apostle Islands or Upper Peninsula.
It's sprawling, ugly and utterly devoid of interest.
Or is it?
Aside from its barbecue and jazz, most people know little about Kansas City.
But when I went there one April, I found much more than saxophones and spare ribs. Around every corner there are beautiful fountains, sculptures and tiers of flowers. There are blues and swing and folk in clubs open till 3 a.m. There are microbreweries and boiled crawfish by the pound and Cinderella carriages clopping through streets lined by Spanish haciendas.
And if you want something really exotic, the South is just outside its borders. That’s where people still call each other "Mr.’’ and "Mrs.’’ Where millions of pounds of tobacco are harvested each year. Where the War Between the States ruined a good thing, and those long-ago interlopers are called Yankee dogs.
Over the centuries, waves of history have buffeted Madeline Island and given it as many variations as a Lake Superior agate.
This wooded island off Wisconsin's Bayfield Peninsula, the largest of the 22 Apostle Islands, exerts a magnetic pull.
The Ojibwe came from the east, led to "food that grows on water'' — wild rice — by a cowrie shell in the sky, according to their origin mythology,
In Bemidji, three faces tell much of the town's story.
Chief Bemidji stands facing the lake the Ojibwe called Bemidgegumaug, or "river flowing crosswise.’’ His real name was Shay-Now-Ish-Kung, and he fed the white people who settled on the lake's shores in 1888. Their settlement became the first town on the Mississippi, which starts 35 miles south in Itasca State Park, winds north to Bemidji, flows through its lake and turns south again.
A stern, square-shouldered Paul Bunyan stands a block away, at the edge of the old-fashioned amusement park. When he and his blue ox, Babe, were built for Bemidji's first Winter Carnival in 1937, the town's lumberjacks were still around, still telling stories of the logging camps that, not long before, had fed the area's magnificent white pines into the maw of the sawmill.
A hundred years ago, Grand Marais was a wind-buffeted outpost at the tip of the North Shore, stomping grounds of trappers, loggers and fishermen. The dirt road connecting the village to Duluth often was impassable, and winter provisions had to be brought in by steamer before Lake Superior iced over.
But amid the hardship, there was always art.
Swedish immigrant Anna Johnson was first to create and sell art, at the log trading post she operated with her husband after their 1907 marriage. Trained at Augustana College in Rockford, Ill., she painted, drew and worked in stained glass, leather and ceramics. Some of her many oils now hang in a log replica of her store, the Johnson Heritage Post Gallery.
On a summer day on Chequamegon Bay, there are few sights more enchanting than the sailboats bobbing around Bayfield.
With the Blessing of the Fleet in June, the tourist season kicks into high gear. Ferries chug nonstop between Bayfield and Madeline Island. Excursion boats head for the other Apostles. Sailboat captains take out novices and teach them how to hoist a jib.
Once, these waters were full of cargo boats, ferrying brownstone and lumber and herring to cities in the East. Bayfield hummed with industry, and town fathers hoped it would become another Chicago.
In Chippewa Falls, people owe a debt to two kinds of folks: the bubbas and the geeks.
The first came to harvest the lumber and stayed to drink the beer, or so claims the brewery: "It takes a special beer to attract 2,500 men to a town with no women,'' says Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing, founded in 1867 and now the oldest business in town.
Then came the guys with slide rules. The son of the city engineer spent his childhood in Chippewa Falls tinkering with radios, then went off to war and college. Seymour Cray co-founded Control Data in the Twin Cities but in 1962 returned to Chippewa Falls, where he opened a lab, putting the locals to work on the world's first supercomputer.
For much of its existence, Dubuque, Iowa, has been a little short on charisma.
It started out well, with a lead-mining boom and eight breweries and Victorian mansions filled with millionaires.
But it faded into obscurity. Its last brewery sits empty next to the 1856 Shot Tower, where laborers once turned molten lead into bullets and cannonballs by dropping it through screens into cool river water.
For a hamlet out in nowhere, Lanesboro is picturesquely blessed.
It’s hemmed in by tall limestone bluffs, circled by a spring-fed trout stream and bisected by one of the nation’s best bicycle trails. Eagles, herons and egrets cruise along the scenic river just to the north, alongside canoeists and kayakers.
Nineteenth-century brick storefronts line downtown, which won a Great American Main Street award from the National Trust for
Historical Preservation in 1998; Lanesboro still is the only Minnesota town that has earned the honor.
Ever since it was settled, Park Rapids has been a crossroads for tourists.
The trains that hauled out white pine at the turn of the century brought in summer guests, who were met at the depot by resort owners and taken to the lakes in wagons.
When highways were built, Park Rapids became the gateway to Itasca State Park, 20 miles to the north. After the rail line was abandoned, it became the western trailhead of the Heartland State Trail, one of the nation's first paved bicycle trails.
On a single day in Winnipeg, a tourist can learn a few words of Cree, dine on curry and conch, and come face to face with Queen Victoria.
The empire on which the sun never sets has come to the Canadian prairie, and so have a whole lot of other countries.
The Cree and Assiniboine — Aboriginals, they’re called here — came first. Then a French explorer arrived at the juncture of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, and a Scottish lord brought in Scottish and Irish settlers. In the 1870s and 1880s, immigrants from Eastern Europe poured in, followed in the next century by Asians, East Indians and Caribs.
In a verdant little glen in southwest Wisconsin, the 13th century makes a reprise appearance every year.
It comes with pageantry, bloodshed and a whole lot of noble sentiments, courtesy of the 18th-century dramatist Friedrich Schiller. It also comes in German that’s as meaty as the Landjaeger sausages sold to spectators. As I arrived during the first act of "Wilhelm Tell,’’ a rich Swiss patriot was discussing the horrors of war with his wife.
"Furchtbar schlect ist der Krieg!’’ he cries, to which Gertrud replies, "Den Brand warf ich hinein mit eigner Hand!" — "I’ll throw the first torch myself!’’
There's something inspiring about a certain pocket of northeast Iowa.
It's nurtured a a beloved children's-book author, a famous composer and two brilliant woodcarvers. It's stirred battalions of people who create art, preserve heirloom seed and carry on Norwegian culture.
There are a lot of stories in these hills and valleys on the edge of the Driftless Area, which escaped the flattening effects of the glaciers.
Out in the countryside, it's a good time to go hunting.
There's so much to scout out — autumn colors, new trails, interesting shops. Lots of people head for the river valleys, to orchards on the St. Croix and towns along the Mississippi.
But one October, two girlfriends and I headed north instead. And in an overlooked part of the state, between Brainerd and Mille Lacs, we found a rich vein of fun.
On Wisconsin's Kinnickinnic River, paddling is a lot like playing pinball — except your boat is the ball.
Quickened by springs and creeks as it flows toward the St. Croix, the Kinni is no lazy river. Cold and insistent, it scoops up a boat and gives it a ride, slapping it between boulders, bumping it over rubble and shooting it over rapids. All the person in the boat has to do is sit tight and steer.
On a warm summer day, it's the coolest possible place to play. So one August, my husband and I drove to River Falls, a college town that calls itself "The City on the Kinni."
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.
There are few towns more conspicuously American than New Ulm, Minn.
Laid out by the town founders, its wide streets follow an orderly grid toward downtown, where cars park at an angle in front of boxy brick businesses and meat-and-potatoes cafes.
There are softball games and Friday-night fish fries and many friendly people. It's the epitome of small-town America — and yet this is a town famous for being German.
From the beginning, Hayward has been a rough town.
It sprang up in Wisconsin's north woods along with the logging camps, and its saloons and brothels gave it a reputation that was reflected in a rail conductor's call: "All aboard for Hayward, Hurley and Hell!"
After resorts replaced logging camps, muskie wranglers joined lumberjacks as mythic figures. The fishing feats are enshrined at the National Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame, home of a 143-foot fiberglass muskie, but the lumberjacks — many of them graduates of the Hayward Log Rolling School — still are chopping, sawing and birling for tourists at the Lumberjack Bowl.
Around Ely, beauty is stripped down to essentials.
There's little but water, stone, spruce and sky in the northern Minnesota wilderness, what conservationist Sigurd Olson called "the naked grandeur." Still, it enthralls visitors from all over the world.
In winter, snow, ice and silence settle over the forests and lakes, and stars plaster the inky night sky. For many, Ely's pull is even stronger then.
When it comes to small towns, there really is such a thing as love at first sight.
In 2000, Joy Gieseke was traveling to Madison from her economic-development job in Kansas when she stopped for a few hours in Mineral Point, Wis. She went about her business, but eight months later, she started looking for a job there, found the chamber position open and grabbed it.
"I don't know why Mineral Point hit me so hard," Gieseke says. "I had never heard about it before, but I stumbled across it and couldn't get it out of my mind. I've stumbled across a lot of little towns and just thought, well, that was cute.
In Ashland, Wis., the ghosts of the past appear in living color.
Once, these lighthouse keepers, lumberjacks and lieutenants lived only in the history books. Now, they're painted onto Ashland's walls, where they serve as backdrop to shoppers, college students and tourists going about their business downtown.
The first mural, painted for Wisconsin's sesquicentennial in 1998 by local artists Kelly Meredith and Susan Prentice Martinsen, featured the snowshoe-clad figure of pioneer Asaph Whittlesey as well as editor Sam Fifield, Ojibwe Chief Buffalo and other characters from the town's early days.
In St. Croix Falls, Wis., all paths lead to enlightenment.
Hiking on the 1,000-mile Ice Age National Scenic Trail, bicycling the 48-mile Gandy Dancer State Trail or paddling on the 252-mile St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, people follow a path that was cut by a 600-foot-high wall of ice and traversed by woodland nomads, fur traders and railway laborers.
Visitors can soak up lore galore about ancient and natural history. But the real revelation here is St. Croix Falls, the unassuming river village that's at the start of it all.
To some people, nothing is a finer destination than the dusty gravel pits around Moose Lake in northern Minnesota.
A billion years ago, when fresh lava was cooling around what is today Lake Superior, dissolved minerals flowed into gas bubbles that had formed on top layers. Other minerals coated the first layers, some red from iron or white from calcium, and over time heat and pressure squeezed them into stone.
Then, the glaciers came, fracturing the surrounding rock and freeing the agates. Pushed along by ice, they were tumbled, polished and eventually dumped along with other glacial rubble.
It would be natural, for a tourist, to arrive in Sturgeon Bay and just keep going. It would also be a mistake.
The rest of Door County has all the tourist trappings. But Sturgeon Bay has appeal of its own.
"Most people want to go farther up on Door County, for all the shops and such," says Bill Munroe, a volunteer at the Door County Maritime Museum. "But this is a working town. We like it down here. We like it very much."
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.'"
Passersby on I-94 can't fail to notice the nuclear-power reactor that marks
the town. In winter, it's the power plant that attracts a flock of trumpeter swans, which thinks the plant's warm
discharge waters are a little spa just for them (See Snow
birds).
Of course, the flock of swans draws a flock of swan-watchers. One January, Torsten and I were among them, standing along the shore of the river and marveling at the raucous crowd of hundreds of birds, jostling for food and attention.
But it was cold, and you can only watch birds for so long. And luckily, it turns out there's more to do in and around Monticello.
To warm up, we retreated to Jam ‘n’ Jo Espresso, on the ridge above Swan Park. It turned out that 16-year-old Laura Scadden, who made my mocha, lives across from the swan park on Mississippi Drive.
“I grew up with the swans,’’ she said. “I’m used to them, but not to the people.’’ Then she waved her hand around the comfortable shop, which has a sofa and shelves of magazines, books and games. “It’s good for here, though.’’
From Jam ‘n’ Jo, we drove into town on Broadway Avenue. Once, Monticello was known for its antiques shops; now, only Riverstreet Station remains, housing about 18 dealers. We wandered down aisles full of Americana, including a Skookum Chief figure in a blanket coat, $465, a Shirley Temple doll in a tam and kilt, $135, and a collection of platinum-haired, pointy-breasted Barbies, $10-$20.
Then we drove five miles down I-94 to do some serious shopping at the Albertville Premium Outlets. First, we made a beeline for Harry & David, where smiling saleswomen fed us samples of chocolate strawberries, yogurt pretzels and pepper and onion relish, the store’s biggest seller. Then we plowed our way through Eddie Bauer, Levi’s, Adidas and Bass in the old section and drove over to the Promenade, a new section with a vaguely Mediterranean look. There, we browsed through Liz Claiborne, Aerosole, Kenneth Cole, Villeroy & Boch, Rug D9cor and Ecco, where we saw a lot of nice things, but nothing so tempting I couldn’t live without it.
The Riverwood Inn, a conference center on landscaped grounds along the Mississippi, is just three miles up the road and offers a Shop and Stay package. When we checked in, we got a surprise from front-desk manager Carolyn Cooper.
“I had you in Room 211, but the people in 203 have canceled, and they had champagne and chocolate already set up for them,’’ she said. “Would you like to have that room and save me the trouble of going up to get them?”
We were happy to oblige. We settled into our attractive sage-green room, which had oak furniture and a bay window, then walked over to Timothy‘s, the inn’s restaurant. I liked my pepper-crusted New York strip with blue cheese and garlic mashed potatoes, and especially the $2.50 glasses of Talus, one of the better inexpensive wines. Torsten was not so lucky, having ordered cranberry-merlot chicken that was dry and came with crunchy risotto, but he had no quibbles with the double-chocolate cake.
We spent the next morning watching the birds at Swan Park, having pulled on extra socks and fleeces. A few geese brave the swan hordes along the shore, and a crowd of ducks provide a comical show in Lawrence’s back yard, hurrying away as she approaches, then waddling right after her as she walks away.
As Lawrence carried corn, visitors trickled in. Kriste Maus lives just across the highway from Mississippi Drive, and she’d brought her three kids to see the swans for the first time.
“We see them flying overhead all the time,’’ she said.
When our feet went numb, we drove downtown for brunch at Crostini Grille, a beautifully designed newer restaurant on Broadway. There were stems of fresh alstroemeria on every table, cherrywood furnishings, wall sconces, a gas fireplace and walls lined with windows, through which we watched the world go by as our server brought out plates of fresh strawberries, cinnamon rolls, eggs, meats, potatoes and penne with a pesto cream sauce.
It was starting to snow as we headed for the Historic Rand House, a hilltop estate in town. Built in 1884 by Minneapolis Gas Light Co. owner Rufus Rand as a gift to his bride, whose parents lived next door, it’s now a B&B, the other nice place to stay in Monticello.
Duffy Busch bought the 30-room Queen Anne in 1986 and restored it with her husband, Merrill. She gave us a tour, leading us from one airy, light-filled room to another.
“This was their ‘cabin,’ their little shack in the woods,’’ she said, and pointed to the plentiful windows. “This is very unusual for its type. Most Victorians are very closed up, but this was built as a country home.’’
Many guests like to watch the swans, Busch said.
“I used to say they were one of the best-kept secrets in the state, that and Lake Maria State Park,’’ she said.
We still had some daylight left, so we drove to the nearby park to get some exercise. The park has one of the last remnants of the Big Woods that once covered southern Minnesota, and normally, its rolling trails are one of the best places to ski near the Twin Cities. Lacking snow, we hiked instead, through oak forest and frosted meadows to Bjorkland Lake. But everything was ready for winter — the brush carefully cleared off trails, skating rink smoothly surfaced, fire laid in the visitor center/warming house.
“It’s so fun to ski here,‘’ Torsten said. “We have to come back.’’
In winter, there are many reasons to spend a weekend in Monticello. Swans, skiing, shopping — it’s a trifecta that’s always a good bet.
It's funny how a simple stretch of frozen water can trigger so much anticipation.
The Bayfield Peninsula, on the northern tip of Wisconsin, is in summer a playground of sand, water and woods, beloved by tourists.
In winter, the playground expands.