Tales from the start of our road trip adventure

Welcome to those who have recently signed up to receive email notifications to follow our road trip adventure! I hope to generate posts every couple of weeks, but it could be more or less depending on what is going on!

When Mark and I envisioned this road trip, one of our main goals is to really BE in a place. Experience it. Relax. Talk to Locals. Explore off the beaten path. Remain flexible. And, when it’s time to move on, avoid the immediate feeling of ‘we didn’t spend enough time here’. For a variety of reasons, Week 1 on the road was a bit more hectic than we had envisioned. Don’t get me wrong, we have kick-ass planning skills and we saw a lot of cool places; however, we already have a running list of places to visit the next time!

Our ‘date of departure’ was later in August than we had anticipated and we continued to find things we wanted to experience in Minnesota. Also, my Type A personality is strong and the urge to plan every second is a difficult trait to modify (but I am working on it!). As a result, we spent a lot of time driving during our first week, but not much time actually exploring.

We left our Canton, MI home on Saturday, August 14th and headed west to visit my sister and her family for a couple of days. It was nice to see familiar faces and hit the road freshly showered with clean laundry. From Illinois, we drove north to Lake Wissota, Wisconsin late on Monday morning. We passed cranberry bogs (did you know that Wisconsin produces half of the cranberries in the US?) and drove by the world’s largest Culver’s. Wisconsin was mostly as I had imagined with rolling green hills and farms. Lake Wissota State Park is beautiful and there is a paved bike trail that leads to lakes and waterfalls in the region. We reached the campground after 5PM and, unfortunately, left this area largely unexplored.

Click on any image below to open the gallery and read the caption

On Tuesday morning, we were up early and drove 3 hours to Duluth, Minnesota. Minnesota has been on my ‘to visit’ list for as long as I can remember and Duluth was the perfect entry point for our travels to this state. Duluth reminds me of a miniature Pittsburgh because the town is built on a hill overlooking the water and interesting bridges. I thought ‘the only thing missing is an incline’! We spent the afternoon biking along the Lakewalk trail. It is beautiful and follows Lake Superior. We watched a barge go under the Aeriel Lift Bridge, which is the most photographed bridge in Duluth. We even found a local ice cream shop where we had elderberry honey vegan ice cream; it was seriously the bomb-diggity!

We are members of Harvest Hosts, which provides us the opportunity to camp at select farms, wineries and breweries throughout the United States and Canada. We camped at a small cider farm outside of Duluth and it was picture-perfect! After chatting with Farmer Bob, we bought some hard cider and honey for our travels. We watched the sun set over a field of sheep and woke up to the sound of roosters! The farm was quaint, quiet and the perfect ending to our first day in Minnesota.

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Up next is Voyageurs National Park; it was so incredible that it deserves its own post! Don’t forget to check out the updated ‘Let’s Play the Gas Game’ post!

Make it a great day! 😘