Mary's City

In the 1970s hit TV series of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, her character Mary Richards, newly arrived in Minneapolis from the fictional small town of Roseburg, Minnesota, exuberantly flings her beret into the air, an iconic toss featured each week in the opening sequence of the show.  Hoping to make a fresh start in a new career, Richards had fled to Minneapolis after breaking up with her boyfriend and fell in love with this city of skyways.  When we visited the city a couple weeks ago, I did, too.

Tim and I had planned to spend our week in Minneapolis with our children, but conflicts arose and they were unable to join us.  Disappointing, but since neither Tim nor I had visited here before, we decided to give the city a fair trial.

First on our itinerary was a major league baseball game between The Twins and the Tampa Rays.  Smarting from a demoralizing loss to the Rays the night before (19-6, ouch!), the Twins roared back to defeat their opponents 11 to 7 on Sunday, July 15th.

Under a clear blue sky we, along with 25,559 other fans, cheered them on.  When Brian Dozier hit a grand slam with loaded bases in the overtime 10th inning at Target Field, the crowd went wild and I fell in love with the Twins.  How thrilling!  America's game at its best!

Then back to our downtown Airbnb condo to quickly shower off the sunscreen and don our best clothes.  We had tickets to see West Side Story at the Guthrie Theater.

The director, Joseph Haj, tweaked this musical retelling of Romeo and Juliet to speak to contemporary immigrant tensions by turning the white gang members of the Jets into a mix of Afro-Americans and second generation whites who rumble with the more recently arrived Puerto Ricans.

The stage's backdrop showed a tilling State of Liberty.

The tragic story of Maria and Tony, the star-crossed lovers caught between the racial loyalties of the Jets and the Sharks, shines amid finger-snapping choreography and the music of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein.  I loved it!

I also loved the view of the Mississippi River from the 4th floor outdoor balcony of the Guthrie Theater.

On Monday our friends Chris and Doug who we met at our very first Habitat build in January 2016 showed us their beloved city by bicycle.

Their friends, (now our friends) Gary and Joanne, joined us as Doug cycled us along the Mississippi River to Minnehaha Falls and past five beautiful bodies of water in the Chain of Lakes (Nokomis, Lake Harriet, Bde Maka Ska, Lake of the Isles and Cedar Lake).

Doug even took us to see the fictional Mary Richards' apartment which is actually a house that was recently on the market for $1.6 million.

With stops for lunch

and ice cream

and numerous photo ops,

Spoonbridge and Cherry is the centerpiece of the Walker Art Center's Sculpture Garden.

we enjoyed much of what makes Minneapolis consistently ranked as one of the top bike cities in the country.

Plus, we had a great time with friends, both new and old.

Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum
Artist unknown, "Ring It Again, Buy U.S. Gov't Bonds," 1918
James Montgomery Flagg, "I Want You For U.S. Army," 1917

During our bicycle ride, I'd caught a glimpse of the futuristic-looking Weisman Art Museum across the Mississippi River on the campus of the University of Minnesota and determined to pay it a visit the next day.  Designed by Frank Gehry, the museum was hosting an exhibition entitled "Fight or Buy Bonds," a collection of propaganda posters produced to rally Americans to support the Allies during World War I.  All the posters included in the exhibit were wonderful but James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam poster is undoubtedly the most famous.

Our final day in this city nicknamed The Mill City began appropriately at the Mill City Museum built in the ruins of the Washburn "A" Mill, once the world's largest flour mill, which was destroyed by an 1878 explosion and rebuilt the following year.

St. Anthony Falls 

Cadwallader Colden Washburn bought the waterpower rights on the Mississippi in Minneapolis in the early 1870s and with his partner, John Crosby, built a number of flour mills that along with his rival competitor, Charles A. Pillsbury, put Minneapolis on the map as the nation's flour-milling capital.  "It required 375 railroad cars, or a train two and a half miles in length, to move the average daily output of the Minneapolis flour mills," wrote a reporter for the Kittson County Enterprise in 1886.  Washburn-Crosby became General Mills in 1928 with a focus that gradually shifted from milling flour to producing cereals and baking mixes.  When the mill was closed in 1965, machines that had been here for decades were simply left in place.

Most of those machines were destroyed on February 26, 1991, when a fire swept through the building.  The mill was abandoned until the Minneapolis Historical Society took it over and refurbished it as this museum which opened in 2003.

Interesting to me was the museum's exhibit about Betty Crocker.  My mom's Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook which she received as a wedding gift in 1951 is losing its front cover and its well-worn pages are smeared with flour and stained with ingredients.

I learned to cook with the help of its step-by-step instructions illustrated with pictures.  When I was a little girl, I thought Betty Crocker was a real person, but instead she was created to answer the flood of questions about baking the Washburn-Crosby Company received following a 1921 promotion for the company's Gold Medal Flour.  As a high-school senior, I took the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow exam as a lark, but my test results embarrassingly earned me the award.

I'm sure Mary Richards, a feminist icon during the Equal Rights Amendment era, would have been just as appalled by the award as my adolescent self was.

The End of The Road

Well, it's not exactly the end of The Great River Road, but it is for us.  Our memorable road trip will terminate tonight in Minneapolis, but before it does, I have plans to make three stops, all very different from one another.  But then that's the way our two weeks on The Road have been.  Tim and I have seen a wide variety of attractions, amazingly so considering that most of the river towns we've passed through have been small and rural in nature.  We've visited everything from nature centers to historic sites to wineries to factories to locks and dams.  Today would be no different.

The quilts and doily owned by the Wilder family and the first edition of Little House in the Big Woods are the museum's prizes.

First and most important on my list was the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum in Pepin, Wisconsin.  When I was a child, I devoured Wilder's Little House series drawn from events of her childhood and adolescence in the pioneer days of Midwest.  "Once upon a time...a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs," read the opening lines of her first book, Little House in the Big Woods.  

I wanted to see the cabin where her parents homesteaded near Pepin so when the museum docent gave me directions for the next best thing, its replica seven miles northeast of town, I persuaded Tim to take me there.

The Little House Wayside was charming.  Its two rooms with an outdoor water pump nearby were almost exactly as I'd pictured it.

The only disparity was that the woods, not surprisingly, have been replaced by fields of corn.

Villa Bellezza Winery

As a reward for Tim's patient detour to the Wayside, we added two unscheduled stops to the day's itinerary: two wine tastings on the Great River Road Wine Trail.  The trail's map lists eleven wineries along The Road in Wisconsin and Minnesota.  I'd never heard of ice wine produced from grapes that have been frozen while still on the vine, but I had the chance to try a sip at Villa Bellezza Winery.

In the tasting room which was once a former bank, Debbie, our server, explained that the water within the grapes freezes and is pressed away, leaving more concentrated sugary grape juice for fermentation.

The result is a sweet dessert wine that is delectable and worthy of storage in the winery's vault.

Next up was the Maiden Rock Winery & Cidery.  Their specialty are the hard ciders made from apples grown in their orchards.  Their HoneyCrisp Hard is a semi-dry concoction that I found to my liking.

Stockholm Pie & General Store

Two stops on the Wine Trail were our limit.  We needed some food to soak up the alcohol's effects.

A stop at the Stockholm Pie & General Store was just the ticket.

Oh, my!  The pie!  I chose a slice of Blackberry Custard from their extensive list of fruit pies, nut pies, custard pies and seasonally available pies and it did not disappoint.  Delicious!

Back in the car and once again on The Road, we crossed the Mississippi one final time into Minnesota, our ultimate destination--Minneapolis.  But there was one more stop on my list--Red Wing, MN, where 5000 boots a day are made with pride at the Red Wing Shoe Factory.

At the turn of the 20th century, Charles Beckman, a local shoe merchant, saw a need for footwear that would hold up better for area farmers, loggers and miners.

Advertisement on display at Red Wing Shoe Museum

He closed his store and founded the Red Wing Shoe Company in 1905.  Today Red Wing shoes are shipped to 110 countries around the world.

A display behind glass shows the steps production of a shoe takes from cutting the leather pieces to stitching its trademark triple-stitch seams to the bottoming when a liquid is injected into a mold that fastens the upper to the sole.

All of those same techniques went into producing Red Wing's largest workboot ever witnessed by the civilized public, a boot that is 20 feet long, 16 feet tall and seven feet wide.  Its eyelets each weigh four pounds while its shoelace is 100 and four feet long.  Created to celebrate the company's centennial and officially recorded by Guinness World Records in 2005, this shoe is a photo opportunity worthy of any visitor.

So that's it!  I'd hoped we could follow The Road all the way to the Mississippi's source in Itasca State Park, but that's 220 miles north and a little west of Minneapolis.  Too far to fit into this trip!  Maybe next time!

Eagles From Art to Aerie

A shelf of toy bald eagles at the National Eagle Center

Tim and I planned this trip along The Great River Road more or less on the fly.  When I picked up the map in Memphis for this National Scenic Byway, I knew I'd have to spend some time each evening deciding how far to go, which attractions to visit the next day and where we'd sleep tomorrow night.  There was no opportunity for a day of downtime devoted to trip planning.  Since we needed to be in Minneapolis by July 13th, we had to make a concerted push to meet that deadline.

So I sighed with relief when I realized we could spread the last 170 miles over two easy days of travel, giving us a chance to arrive by check-in time at our final motel and sleep late the next morning.

Therefore, I persuaded Tim that we had time to stop at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona, Minnesota right on the bank of the Mississippi River.  Every work of art in this small museum focuses on the artist's relationship with water.  I was surprised to find world-class artists and paintings such as

Homer Winslow, Winding Line [Oil on canvas], 1874, Private collection

Claude Monet, La Siene à Vétheuil [Oil on canvas], 1881, Private collection

Pablo Picasso, Homme Addis, [Watercolor and Ink on paper], 1933, Private collection

One of only two existing autographed versions of Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze is also on display here, purchased by the museum's founders, Mary Burrichter and her husband, Bob Kierlin, owner of Fastenal, a Winona-based hardware-supply company.  The other larger version hangs in New York's Museum of Metropolitan Art.

Very cool, don't you think?

Andy Warhol, Bald Eagle, from Endangered Species F. & S. II 296 [Screenprint in colors on Lenox Museum Board],  1983, Ronald Feldman Gallery

Also very cool was the museum's current exhibition called Eagles Over Water featuring eagle related art and ephemera that ranged from works by John James Audubon to Andy Warhol.

Yet, it was the exhibit of paintings by Thomas Paquette that filled me with delight.  His three-year odyssey along the same roads we had just traveled culminated in his America's River Re-Explored: Paintings of the Mississippi from Source to Gulf, a monumental work of 46 paintings.  Seeing the river through his eyes was like revisiting an old friend.

Thomas Paquette, Alma's Buena Vista [Oil on linen], 2017, Minnesota Marine Art Museum

Trying to find an image of one of Paquette's Mississippi works to post here, I could only find the above on the museum's web site, but Tim and I had not yet driven as far as Alma, Wisconsin.  Checking the map, I saw that it was only 25 miles farther up the road so back in the car we climbed.

However, this prospect was not an easy location to find.  When we arrived in Alma, Wisconsin, a tiny town that clings to the overhanging bluffs, there was a small signpost to Buena Vista park that pointed up a very steep hill.  I'd read that you have to drive up a narrow, winding road and this looked like the one.  So Tim put the Jeep in second gear to grind up to the top the ridge.  From there, we circled around an additional two miles past several prosperous-looking farms to reach to this park with a big view.

Walking over to the edge of the bluff was like stepping out on a balcony of a very tall hotel.  We had a stunning panoramic view of the river, Lock and Dam #4 and the tiny town of Alma directly below.

I could have stayed there all day to watch the shifting light of the clouds upon the landscape, but hunger forced us back to the car.

The Nelson Creamery was just ten miles up the Great River Road in Nelson, Wisconsin.  The place was bustling even at 2:00 in the afternoon.  Tim pushed his way past all the customers gawking at the wide variety of ice cream flavors to place our order at the sandwich counter.  Ah!  A bean sprout-laden veggie on multi-grain bread paired with a cup of Loaded Baked Potato soup was just the fare to appease my appetite.  Afterwards, we browsed the well-stocked shelves of cheese, wishing we were traveling in a vehicle with a refrigerator.  Alas, that was not the case so sadly we left without making a purchase.

The last stop of the day was in Wabasha, Minnesota at the National Eagle Center, an interpretive center devoted to protecting bald eagles.  Bald eagles congregate along the shorelines of the Upper Mississippi River, migrating here from the frozen areas of Canada to nest and lay their eggs.  Even when bald eagles were endangered, we learned that Wabasha was one of the few places you could still find them.  Due to the fast current here, the Mississippi rarely freezes during the winter.  That means there is abundant food for the eagles.

A child-size eagle's nest, an aerie, was a big hit with small human visitors.  Children and adults alike were enthralled by Angel, Columbia and Was'aka, rescued bald eagles and now ambassadors in the center's daily programs and special events.  We arrived too late to see the eagles in action, but our visit did bring back memories of a night-time program about raptors we'd seen at the Badlands National Park.

When we checked into the motel that afternoon, the owner mentioned a concert was scheduled down at the river next to the National Eagle Center that evening.  We meant to go, but Tim fell asleep.  I didn't wake him, preferring to have some quiet time to work on my blog.  I was so far behind in posting what we'd seen.  I knew my memories would fade if I didn't make an effort to catch up.  Looking back on this day, I realized we'd begun by viewing art inspired by eagles and finished at the center devoted to education and preservation of eagles.  That's serendipity, because I certainly didn't plan it!