We chose to stay at the Prairie Cove Campground in Ashby, MN for no other reason than convenience. It’s a nine hour drive from Minneapolis to our next major stop at Theodore Roosevelt National Park on the western edge of North Dakota. We don’t do nine hour drives, so we needed a place to overnight. Prairie Cove, immediately off of I-94, was about as convenient as we could ever hope for. We expected it to be a noisy parking lot. What we found instead was a beautiful lake among rolling hills with flocks of Great Blue Heron and Snowy Egrets. Every campground should be like this.
City of Lakes
With 22 lakes and more than 170 parks, Minneapolis is an outdoor lover’s dream. Its park system has been called ‘the best-designed, best-financed, and best-maintained in America.’ We found ourselves drawn to Lake Harriet, one of seven bodies of water comprising the city’s Chain of Lakes, all of which is found just 10 minutes from downtown city skyscrapers. Awesome.
It’s Japanese to Me
They had us at “sake brewery;” but discovering that Moto-I in uptown Minneapolis also specializes in Asian street food made it a completely irresistible stop for us.
Anyone who has followed our travels for any length of time knows we like our drink: beer, wine, scotch, bourbon – it’s all good. We enjoy sake, too, but haven’t really had it often enough to know much about it. What better place to learn, we figured, than at the first sake brewery and restaurant outside of Japan?
History is Written by the Victor
This fresco hangs above the State House of Representatives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I wonder if they see the irony. Perhaps a better inscription would read “History is written by the victor.”