Our journey began early in the morning, much earlier than I normally wake up to work. Our initial plan is to stay in Lutsen and do some hiking in some state parks to view the fall colors on the weekend. Since we already have a Minnesota state park annual pass, we might as well maximize the usage. The parks we planned to cover are Tettegouche State Park, Temperance River State Park, Cascade River State Park and Grand Portage State Park. This is probably the first time we went up north without really stopping by much in Duluth.
I must admit this trip was somewhat disappointing at first because the further north we drove, the greener the leaves were. Perhaps, our expectation skyrocketed after passing by many golden corn fields and plutonium green fields. So, after hiking the trails in Tettegouche State Park and Temperance River State Park on Friday, we decided to forgo our visit to Cascade River State Park and spent more time in Grand Portage State Park on Saturday. There, we finally enjoyed some really nice fall colors after a few hours of deep forest hiking. Somehow, the weather was rather bone chilling cold on the weekend, with the temperature hovering around 50s. Nevertheless, the cool temperature made the hiking trip a little more enjoyable.
We had both of our dinners in Grand Marais… pretty touristy. For our first night, we had our meals at My Sister’s Place. We came to know about this place through the Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern” where Andrew tried out fried gizzard. This place is famous for its tasty burgers. So, we also tried fried gizzard and two burgers. There is nothing bizarre about eating the gizzard, not sure why Andrew made a big fuss about it. We Chinese folks eat practically anything that crosses our path (except human because we don’t do cannibalism). For our second night, we had some of the best Lake Superior fishes at Angry Trout Cafe. We had yummy grilled Trout and deep fried Herring… no wonder the Trout is angry because we just reduced its population, at least the Herring is pretty happy about it. We were glad to have our dinner early because there were lots of people waiting to be seated by the time we left.
