Mankato, MN

Several days ago, I was looking at the map and wondering about the route for the rest of the trip. We were in Sioux Falls, SD and I happened to see the town of Mankato, MN pop up on the map and it happened to be mostly east and a little north from us. It caught my eye, not because of Harris’s choice for VP, although he taught school here for quite a number of years, but because Dana’s nephew and his family live here. I asked if we should swing by and see them. She contacted him and we made arrangements to meet them on Saturday afternoon for some mushroom hunting. Ryan is an avid hunter and geek of all things mushrooms. So we will do some scrounging and then we will get some pizza and hang out with them for the evening. This morning we headed out for the land of 10,000 lakes. We found a state park just outside Mankato and will be spending several days there.

We only had about 150 miles for the day so we were in no hurry to head out this morning. We needed to stop by Walmart to pick up some things for the next several days. We filled up with gas, did our shopping and stopped by Dairy Queen for Dana’s annual pumpkin blizzard. We headed on north and east. As usual, I located a coffee shop along the way hoping for some place that we could get a good pick me up before getting to the campground. It was more of a let down than a pick us up. It was a thrift store/restaurant that tried to do coffee as well. The mocha was barely tolerable although the coffee was pretty good. I ordered a blackberry bacon turkey panini. Now that was worth the stop.

We arrived at our campground and we set up our trailer for the night. We headed to the park office to pay for our entrance fee, bought some firewood, looked at the Minneopa falls, and then drove through the free range bison park. We saw a number of bison but they were busy grazing and we decided not to pet them. Actually we were not allowed out of our cars and we drove along the dirt road that passed through their habitat.

We returned to our camp, ate a sandwich, yogurt, and a salad for dinner. After our dinner we started a fire but as the sun went down it started to get quite chilly so we headed inside.

Tomorrow will be a bit cool but we are only about 6 miles from the city and we plan to ride our bikes to the city and see what we can see.

The morning will be very chilly and the coffee will be awesome!

Tomorrow will be five weeks since we left Indiana. It seems so much longer than that but it has gone by very quickly.Read more