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The only disparity was that the woods, not surprisingly, have been replaced by fields of corn.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