July 28-31, 2018

We left the North Woods of Minnesota and followed the Mississippi River south to the big city life in Minneapolis/St. Paul. We had booked a nice pull through site at Lebanon Hills Regional Park Campground for four nights, with electric. This is an important note because those hot and humid days were still following us on our travels and we were thankful we had air conditioning each night. While checking the campground out on Google Maps I realized we were right across the street from the Minneapolis Zoo… so we added that to the touring list.

We were here to hit a few more National Parks: Mississippi River and St. Croix Scenic River. Well, what do you know? The Mississippi River Visitor Center is accessed through the lobby of the Science Museum of Minnesota and our Maryland Science Center membership gets us in free… we added that to the list (you can hear John groaning at the expanding schedule at this point).

The list did seem to be ever expanding and we were hitting two, three, even four sights on one day. There was very little down time in Minneapolis and so much more we would have done if we had more time.

When we got permission to do a seven week summer trip with Chloe, we thought we’d have lots of leisure time, wander along, take it easy. Did not happen… and it wasn’t all me. John and Chloe added to the list too. We’d go to one place and they’d tell us about another “Oh, you HAVE to hit blah blah. You can’t come to wherever-we-were without doing blah blah. Far too often blah blah was added to the list.

So while we did have a nice site in a nice park with lots to do, we only made it back each night to snag an ice cream from the camp store, crash into bed and recharge for the next day. We never even drove through the other side of the park where they have hiking trails, a swimming beach, boat rentals, fishing, picnic areas and more. We did use their very nice shower house but pretty much that was it. It was a nice campground in a good location for touring the area.

H