Minnesota Adventure - Day One

 This Sunday morning, I woke up near McGregor Minnesota with a mission to collect some of the locations for the motorcycle event that I am participating in all summer, the Grand Tour of MN.  Here are some of those locations I visited, plus a few others that I thought were interesting.  I hope you also find them interesting.

It is very peaceful in the early morning, beautiful even.  I don’t see this very often because I generally sleep late.  It’s times like these, in the early quiet, that I wonder why I don’t get up early more often just to enjoy it.

An abandoned school near Cromwell.

This is a wood carving of Chief Wrinkled Meat, a Chippewa Indian who reportedly lived to be 137 years old.  His Chippewa name was Ga-Be-Nah-Gwen-Wonce which, roughly translated, means “Wrinkled Meat”.  He also went by the name Chief John Smith. He lived most of his life near Lake of The Woods and Cass lake.  His true age has been argued extensively, and nothing conclusive has ever been determined.  He died in 1922 and is buried in a Cass Lake cemetery.  The birthdate listed on his tombstone is 1784.

This old photo was hanging in the shelter along with the Chief Wrinkled Meat statue.  There doesn’t seem to be a connection to the sculpture, but it is a cool photo.

The little neighborhood where the Chief Wrinkled Meat sculpture is located has quite a number of other “sculptures” and artistic endeavors.  This one is labeled simply enough…

This lumberjack statue in Bigfork MN is another one of the 20 locations I will visit for the Grand Tour.  

An abandoned school in Effie MN. There is still a maintained playground just to the left of this photo.

This sign in the window of a building caught my eye as I rode by it.  Less than a block later, I turned around, and I’m glad I did.  Up in these parts of Minnesota, gathering a pound of mosquitoes isn’t hard.  It’s removing all those wings that makes it not worth it.

This abandoned building is in Togo MN.  I couldn’t find any markings, but it looks like it may have been a school.  Interesting worthless information about Togo: Togo used to have a post office and had been assigned a zip code.  That zip code has been retired, and the mail is now handled by Cook MN. That’s 55723 for those of you who are curious.

The smell of the pines in this area was fantastic.  What you can’t see is how fat my lower lip is from getting attacked by a large mosquito as I paused on the shoulder of the road to enjoy the pines.  In this shot, I’m mulling around the idea of returning to Effie with the now wingless mosquito for my bounty. 

My next stop was Orr MN where not only is there a large bluegill statue that I need for the grand tour, but there’s the Mickey Elverum Bog Walk/Orr Welcome Center.  I didn’t walk the entire boardwalk though, mainly because this is a bog, and we all know what kind of winged creatures live in bogs. That, and my lip was the size of a grilled brat from the last time I stopped to enjoy the scenery. Besides, the welcome center was closed because it was Sunday.

The Boardwalk to a free blood donation.

Billy The Bluegill.

The Rainy Lake Visitor Center, fortunately, was open today.  Honestly, I thought this visitor center was located IN International Falls, and I didn’t know there was a town named Ranier on Rainy Lake.  This area is dominated by the National Park Service.  More on that historical tidbit later.

Here’s the statue I needed to “collect” for the grand tour.  I’m glad the visitor center was open so that I didn’t have to “settle” for a photo of the visitor center sign. 

The visitor center has some exhibits inside as well.  

This is a photo, one of many, that I didn’t realize I had taken while positioning my phone in the selfie stick to take my grand tour photo.  Lloyd, this one’s for you.

This town checked a lot of boxes for me, but I still had a fair distance to ride so I couldn’t fully appreciate everything the town has to offer.  That hair salon though…

This is Big Vic.  Interesting history here. Vic is named after Vic Davis who, in protest of the National Park Service exercising eminent domain to acquire privately owned property in order to establish Voyager’s National Park. The story is long, and I’ll include it in the next photo, but Davis fought the NPS tooth and nail, and he had this statue built in Sparta WI, plus another similar statue, Big Louie, which currently stands in Barnum MN. It’s a bit ironic that this statue stands literally at the entrance to Voyager’s National Park when it was built to fight the NPS for what how they were using eminent domain to take property from people in order to create a national park.

Here’s the story.

I turned over 12,345 miles on the bike today.  I’ve always wanted to stop and take a picture like this, so I did.

Just east of Birchdale MN, there’s a set of sculptures called “Basshenge”.  Not bass as in the fish, but as in the musical instrument. In 2001, Chicago Symphony double bassist Joseph Guastafeste collaborated with artists to create this monument to the double bass. Apparently, the spiral of sculptures forms a bass clef when viewed from above.

Willie Walleye, not to be confused with Billy Bluegill in Orr MN, is located in Baudette MN, where I will (hopefully) wake up on Monday morning.  Considering we have more than 10,000 lakes here in Minnesota, it shouldn’t be surprising we have a ton of fish statues scattered all around the state.

The route for today.  Thanks for looking!