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Escape Artists offers up a global discourse ranging from great finds close to home to adventures far afield. You'll find weekly travel deals here, too. Share your road wisdom, rave about great finds and rant about roadblocks that get in the way of a great trip.
Contributors: Travel editor Kerri Westenberg, Curt Brown, James Lileks and Bill Ward.
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Posts about Road trips
A visit to an underrated state park near Mille Lacs
Posted by: Curt Brown Updated: October 1, 2012 - 11:39 AM
VINELAND, MINN. -- If you're like me, you take Minnesota state parks for granted. But with colors expected to peak this weekend, here's a suggestion: Check out Mille Lacs Kathio State Park.
We signed up for a free archeology canoe tour last weekend and the maples, aspens, sumacs and oaks were just starting to overlap with eruptions of bronze, yellow, orange and blood red. The park sits eight miles north of Onamia and south of Garrison along Hwy. 169 a couple hours north of the Twin Cities.
We learned that archeologists have found clues of people living in the area at least 9,000 years ago. Several small Dakota villages punctuated the area, a crossroads of sorts with access to the Rum, Mississippi and other rivers and a few hefty portages from Lake Superior. In fact, the explorer that the city of Duluth is named after -- Frenchman Daniel Greysolon, Sieur Dulhut -- is the misspeller responsible for Kathio's name.
Greysolon met with the Dakota in the area in 1679 and they called their collective villages Izatys. His sloppy handwriting made the "Iz" look like a "K" and the name stuck. It's one of those gems we fly by at 65 mph, but well worth stopping for a visit. You can rent canoes and paddle around Ogechie Lake, once a hub of Dakota travel and trading. Hunters would transport their buffalo meat up the winding Rum River in the Anoka area to their villages here.
This Saturday, the park is offering a short hike and talk about bird migration from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Go to mile marker No. 221 on Hwy. 169 about eight miles north of Onamia. (This photo of dormant ice houses was snapped along Hwy. 47 around the south side of the lake near Isle.)
Ada to Zumbrota: a virtual tour of every Minnesota county
Posted by: Curt Brown Updated: September 13, 2012 - 12:13 PM
Pat Dodds
From his computer screen in Fresno, Calif., retired teacher Patt Dodds is embarking on quite a trek: He's visiting all 87 Minnesota counties for his new blog, everycounty.org.
The blog is lovely, with nice photos, fun facts and maps -- all culled from the Internet.
"It takes me about three hours of on-line research per county and I'm doing this every Monday, Wednesday and Friday so it should take me about seven months to get from Kittson County in the northwest to Houston County in the southeast," Dodds, 62, tells Escape Artists.
Why is a Fresno guy who grew up and worked at two newspapers in Iowa so obsessed with Minnesota?
About eight years ago, in the pre-blog era, he and his son visited all 99 counties in Iowa. He'd been to the Twin Cities and Rainy Lake and "thought it would be fun to virtually get to know the state better. It's frustrating to only hit the highlights so I'm digging a little deeper."
To wit: He points out that Baudette was rebuilt after a 1910 fire and the Northwest Angle that juts up into Canada ended up in Minnesota because of confusion about the Mississippi River's origins during 1783 Treaty of Paris talks.
He's three counties into his tour with 84 to go, but Dodds is looking ahead.
"Texas has 254 counties," he said.
A dozen weeks on the road
Posted by: Curt Brown Updated: July 25, 2012 - 4:17 PMAmong the highlights: "sunrise surfing in Malibu, falling into a 20-foot snowdrift at Crater Lake, getting robbed in Seattle, lost within the Redwoods at dusk and sword fighting with whale rib bones on the Oregon Coast."
Along with former college roommate Derek Karnatz, he says, "we aquired a lifetime’s worth of lessons in three months. These experiences have changed the way I view the world and my ideas for what is truly possible with a goal and a little imagination."
All in all, a $20 ticket was worth the diversion
Posted by: Curt Brown Updated: May 11, 2012 - 6:32 PMGRAFTON, N.D. -- Numbers, to some extent, define us all. We juggle PINs, social security digits, passport numbers, cell phones and passwords in our brains like some street performer or circus act. Well, I got a new one: No. 877.
Yep, according to the amiable clerk of courts, I became the 877th person ticketed in 2012 in tiny Walsh County, N.D. But what started with a whispered couple of curse words under my breath as state trooper Cashin (pun intended) strolled down the shoulder ended up not such a bad deal.
I pulled off the boring interstate south of Winnipeg looking for a diversion to break up the boredom and check out an old church in the dot of a town called Oakwood, N.D. On the way back to I-29, after rolling through a stop sign in the absolute middle of the flatest stretch of earth -- just east of Grafton -- trooper Cashin zoomed out of a farm field neatly sewn with a spring planting of wheat. He gave me a ticket for $20 and suggested we visit Lower Fort Garry in Winnipeg as he and his wife had recently.
Four miles later, we found the cool art deco court house built in 1940 out of rose marble and other smooth stones and stylish angles. The clerk laughed when I asked if I get the early bird discount for paying my fine within five minutes of my infraction. Outside, I learned that a half-dozen of Grafton's finest had mustered up for service on May 14, 1899 and died in the Spanish-American War trying to quell some revolt in the Philippines. Seems like an awful long way from home. The statue in their honor includes a quote: "No one stampedes the First North Dakota."
No one gets away with a Hollywood stop in Walsh County, either. But for $20, a self-guided tour of a nice piece of architecture with some history thrown in wasn't such a bad deal after all.
Minnesota nudge
Posted by: Bill Ward Updated: May 1, 2012 - 7:25 AMIt's not at all unusual to find yourself saying "Oh, I've always wanted to do that" upon seeing a mention of someplace like the Taylors Falls' Folsom House, the Split Rick Lighthouse or even the inside of the State Capitol.
Well maybe this could be the year, especially with our way-extended warm season. And it doesn't hurt to have a prodder/planner along the lines of the Minnesota Historical Society's 2012 travel map.
Available free via the society's web site, the map highlights more than a score of sites around the state, and could be especially useful in planning a double-dip trip such as Le Sueeur's W.W. Mayo House and St. Peter's Traverse des Sioux (below).
Or perhaps just something closer to home that you've been meaning to check out for years or even decades.
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