June 9 - Minneapolis, Minnesota

Some thunderstorms blew through in the night, keeping us awake for a bit, but we slept in later in the morning so all in all we had a decent night's sleep. I find that the quality of a night's sleep seems to be one of the best predictors of how much I will enjoy what we do on the next day. The rain was still pattering away intermittently as we fixed breakfast, however, so we decided to do our laundry first at a launderette we had spotted in Spring Valley and then drive over to Minneapolis to take another Volksmarch. While waiting for our clothes to be washed we wandered around the town a bit and found a small library (closed) and a historical exhibit in the community building that also housed the police. Spring Valley had a much more extensive history than I had expected, starting out with an iron foundry and lumbering in the late 1800s. Besides the pictures from that period, some of the interesting artifacts in the exhibit were "freebie" business giveaways such as glasses, pill boxes, and calendars designed to be advertisements. Reading all that passed the time away while we waited for our laundry to finish, and at least we weren't bored!

After packing the clean laundry back into the truck, we headed for Minneapolis via a more southerly route than I-94. We had hoped to miss the congestion caused by the road construction on I-94, but there was construction on the southern route also. In fact, when I stopped at a Minnesota welcome center to get a state map, the only one available had a "Construction Zone" label and was apparently intended to show all the road construction projects in the state. These were, in fact, all over the place and it truly looked like Minnesota was one state that had the four basic seasons of Almost Winter, Deep Winter, Still Winter, and Road Construction! But we persevered in our quest and reached the gas station which should have had the start box for our walk, only to find that no one there had any idea where it was. We looked in all the likely places but could not find hide nor hair of it, so we bumped over to Plan B and decided to take the walk in downtown Minneapolis instead. Finding the Millennium Hotel in the 1300 block of Nicolet was a pain in the neck because of all the one way streets and no turn intersections. We tried parking at a metered space on the street, but it required a quarter for every 15 minutes and after doing the laundry we didn't have enough quarters! I ended up sitting in the car while Monika walked around to find the hotel and register us for the walk, and then we pulled into the nearest public parking we could find and reluctantly coughed up the $8 for a spot. Then we walked over to the Nicolet pedestrian mall area and joined the route for this Volksmarch. Walking along Nicolet was truly like walking in a deep canyon among the skyscrapers and gave a completely different feel than walking in downtown St. Paul which had low-rise buildings and a much more open feel. The peaks of the skyscrapers were all around us and their glass was gave us curious rippled reflections of other buildings in the Minneapolis skyline. I noticed the extensive network of skyways connecting the buildings at the first floor level and it seemed that the network was more extensive than the last time I visited about 20 years ago. Being able to walk all over while sheltered from the weather essentially turns the downtown area into one huge mall which is a great idea for the bitter winters they get up here.

But if you take this walk, beware of taking pictures! I was accosted by a security guard for taking a picture of a fountain at the north end of the mall. Although it was not posted anywhere, he said it was prohibited to take pictures of any of the buildings in the area. He did not, however, confiscate my camera like the guards used to do in Communist Russia when you took a picture of a prohibited area. I did not know whether to be relieved that we were still one step away from being just like a totalitarian dictatorship, or completely and utterly horrified that we were just one step away from being just like a totalitarian dictatorship. The cheap and tawdry practice of using "paranoia politics" to win national elections has come at a tremendous price to the basic freedoms of our country. The freedom to take pictures of public buildings might seem like a very small and insignificant freedom, one easily discarded in the pursuit of Homeland Security, but I think losing tiny freedoms is a bell weather for the direction that our current leaders want to take the country in the future. It would be highly ironic if we have won the Cold War only to have the practices and viewpoints of Communist Russia imposed by freely elected leaders. Somewhat unsettled if not offended by all this, I put the camera away and continued the walk.

The pedestrian mall and downtown area ended at the bank of the Mississippi River where we joined a river walk to the west and then crossed over where a lighthouse was guarding the Mississippi traffic. From there we took the "Heritage Trail" section on the other side of the Mississippi back to the east. The Mississippi is still surprisingly large and navigable even to the north of Minneapolis, and Monika said it reminded her of how large the Elbe River was as far inland as Dresden near the Czech Republic (see Wanderung 2). Also similar to Dresden, we found a wide variety of bridges over the Mississippi, ranging from plain utilitarian ones to gracefully arched stone or concrete bridges that were quite pretty as well as functional.

The informational plaques along the Heritage Trail gave snippets of the history of Minneapolis, often combined with pictures of the old buildings which ranged from hydroelectric plants to lumber yards to flour mills. It was kind of like an outdoor museum cum nature trail and I really liked it. We crossed the river on the old stone bridge, the prettiest one of the lot in my opinion, and I was surprised to find that it was built by the same Mr. Hill who had built the ugly mansion over in St. Paul. I think he might have been better off having the bridge architect design his house, but I expect that at that time his house was perceived as quite charming and the bridge as merely functional. It's rather amazing how tastes in things like architecture or interior design have changed over time; I've lived to see the plain white bathroom fixtures of the 50s give way to the earth tones of the 60s and 70s, the severe black and minimalist format of the 80s and 90s and back to the plain white. The really amusing thing is how the people in each period thought that their taste was "right" in some basic sense and would endure for decades rather than being a temporary fad in home decoration.

On the south side of the old stone bridge was a small park that showed ruins of the old flour mills and some of the water channels that used to power the old mills. The parking area there charges just 50 cents an hour, and that is a lot cheaper than anyplace else we found in Minneapolis. Actually, we were amused to see that some parking lots charged wildly different rates depending on what type of event you were parking for. Seeing the Gophers play college football only cost $10 while catching a Vikings NFL football game sets you back $25 for the same spot! Anyway, since that park is right on the walk route, you could drive there and park for two hours for $1, then walk to the starting point, sign up, and walk the normal route back around to your car. That may sound a bit complicated, but it really isn't and would save you a cool $7 (a decent lunch at Culver's!), so you might want to consider it if you are doing this walk

From the park we zigzagged back through downtown Minneapolis to the start point and our car, enjoying nice views of the ever changing skyline along the way. In general, the Minneapolis walk was very different from the St. Paul walk. The Minneapolis walk was about 50% "big inner city" walk and about 50% on the river walk along the Mississippi. The St. Paul walk was about 10% campus town, 50% big fancy old houses, and 40% meandering around the downtown area and the state capital. We enjoyed both walks and would recommend them to others. The Volksmarch clubs here also have several other walks in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area that we didn't have the time to try but which might be quite nice, at least in the summer time!. For bicycle enthusiasts, a 25 kilometer bike event is also offered in each city, which would cover even more areas of each one. I later regretted not doing those Volksbike events.

Since St. Paul was on our way back to camp, we stopped off at the Culver's there to have another nice meal and gas up the truck while we were at it. It was getting so late by then that we just called it dinner and later that evening topped it off with a snack of microwave popcorn while I was writing and Monika was processing the pictures for the day. She also planned our next stop in Minnesota so that we had some idea where we would be headed when we hooked up the trailer and left the next morning!