State Park
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St Louis
October 23, 2022 to October 29, 2022We planned a trip to St Louis to coincide with the area’s peak fall colors by comparing past fall foliage reports and hoped mother nature wouldn’t trick us this year. Unfortunately, just three days after booking the accommodation in July, St Louis broke the 100-year wettest day record where the historic flood water rose to […] Read more…
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Nerstrand Big Woods State Park
October 16, 2022Our seasonal leaf peering activities continued — this time, in Nerstrand Big Woods State Park. This park was named after a Norwegian village where its settlers farmed in this area in the mid-1850s. Although we vividly remember hiking in this park before, that was exactly ten years ago in the fall season, much to our […] Read more…
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New Ulm
October 13, 2022 to October 14, 2022New Ulm — proclaimed “the most German town in America” — has intrigued us for many years. This small city only has a population of 14,000, and it was named after the city of Neu-Ulm in Germany because many original settlers came from that area. When we made a day trip to Mankato earlier this […] Read more…
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Minneopa State Park
July 3, 2022Continuing our state park adventure 2 days in a row, we visited Minneopa State Park in Mankato. Although the area expected scattered showers in the morning, we figured it wouldn’t be any worse than the previous rainy hike in Fort Snelling State Park. This was our first visit to this state park. The distance dissuaded […] Read more…
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Fort Snelling State Park
July 2, 2022Celebrating the long 4th of July weekend, we made our first-ever visit to Fort Snelling State Park. Even though we frequently passed by this state park en route to the Twin Cities, we constantly reminded ourselves to visit it one day. Still, it quickly became an afterthought when we headed up there. So, this time, […] Read more…
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Perrot State Park
June 19, 2022Given the splendid beautiful weekend weather, we took advantage of our Wisconsin state park annual pass by making our second-ever visit to Perrot State Park. Our first visit was in November 2015. We were awestruck by the grand view of the Mississippi River and the Trempealeau Mountain from the summit of Brady’s Bluff. We initially […] Read more…
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Camping in Jay Cooke State Park
June 10, 2022 to June 12, 2022Continuing with our party-crashing trend, we decided to join our friends’ camping trip in Jay Cooke State Park. Although we hiked and snowshoed in this state park several times, this was our first camping trip since the iconic swinging bridge was destroyed by the raging floodwaters in 2012. This time, many friends joined this camping […] Read more…
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Camping in St Croix State Park
May 20, 2022 to May 22, 2022This year, we decided against planning big vacations until we finalized our imminent trip home. Like many folks living abroad, it has been at least 2.5 years since we visited our family members due to the pandemic. Our initial plan was to fly home this early summer. However, we decided against it to wait for […] Read more…
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Grand Marais
March 21, 2022 to March 26, 2022On our 10th visit to the MN North Shore, we made our first-ever visit in the early spring season. We shied away from this time of the year in the past because spring is usually very wet, but we wanted to snowshoe for one last time before putting our gears away. It was unseasonably warm […] Read more…
