But this is the beginning of the 47-mile Edge of the Wilderness scenic route, Minnesota’s first National Scenic Byway. Just 10 blocks from U.S. 2, it leaves the city center and begins to skirt McKinney Lake. Then it winds northward, past pristine forests, undeveloped lakes and the occasional quiet village.

Yes, that’s Door County, all right. But so is this:

Secluded beaches of fine white sand. Estuaries lined with herons. Hiking and bicycle trails winding through sun-dappled cedar forests.

Like Minnesota’s rugged North Shore, Wisconsin’s Door Peninsula was settled by hardy Scandinavian fishermen and loggers. This shore, however, is closer to big cities, which have been sending up vacationing hordes for a century. During the summer, the hubbub can seem overwhelming.

Few know that Otter Tail County has more lakes than any other county in Minnesota — 1,048 — or even that it has lakes at all. It also has the state's densest concentration of giant mascots and roadside sculpture, as well as two state parks, a picture-postcard mill and Inspiration Peak, the state's second-highest point after Eagle Mountain on the North Shore.

It’s a 150-mile stretch of wild beauty, lined by piles of jagged black basalt, cobblestone beaches and the mouths of dozens of rivers, tumbling down from the old beaches of Glacial Lake Duluth. Seven state parks follow their winding gorges, marked by rapids and waterfalls, and the Superior Hiking Trail crosses them on its way from Duluth to the Canadian border.

They don't have that in Florida and Arizona. But here, we've got it all: a bright palette of colors, harvest festivals and nifty little towns to explore.

But those are not the waters for which it's named. Those waters belong to a river whose cloudiness led the Dakota to call it "waters reflecting the skies" — the Minnesota.

It was more than a mile across at the end of the last ice age, when it drained glacial Lake Agassiz, the largest lake that ever existed. Today, it's small and sluggish, and farm runoff and erosion have increased its natural siltiness. But the Minnesota's broad valley, reaching from the South Dakota border to the Twin Cities, is beautiful.

Since 1924, when the first highway opened, the North Shore has been a refuge for city folk tired of congestion, for farmers tired of flat fields, for blue-collar workers tired of the grind. It didn't cost much to come up for a week, rent a little cabin and breathe deeply of air laced with the fragrance of cedar, pine and freshwater waves.

But Waters of the Dancing Sky Scenic Byway turns up a whole new face.

This is a burly part of the state, a scratchy-wool, buffalo-plaid kind of place that might seem Bunyanesque in nature but actually was the stomping grounds of a real-life legend, the shorter but tougher voyageur.

A line of cars waits to cross the Aerial Lift Bridge; people want to get to the beach or the art fair on Park Point. Tourists mill around the marine museum, shops and restaurants. Young men in souped-up trucks slowly cruise along Canal Park Drive, and young girls in town for a soccer tournament rove the sidewalks in packs, trailed by their parents.

Jutting deep into Lake Superior, it's far from big cities — for Detroit residents, Nashville and Washington, D.C., are closer than the Keweenaw (pronounced KEY-win-awe). It was "beyond the most distant wilderness and remote as the moon," statesman Patrick Henry told Congress after early mining attempts were abandoned in 1771.

Their destination? Nowhere. And on one of the state's lovely Rustic Roads, nowhere usually is enough.

Across the state, brown-and-yellow signs point to lightly traveled roads that preserve remnants of the past — piebald llamas (R-92, south of River Falls), an 1870 lighthouse (R-38 in Door County), Amish farms (R-56, south of Ontario).