Lanesboro & the Root River, MN

We left St. Paul on Sunday June 29, headed towards Lanesboro on the Root River. Bob had met a couple in Guatemala who spent their summers in Lanesboro and invited us to camp on their property. Bob had been trying to communicate with them by e-mail without success, forgetting that he had been using his Yahoo account in Canada. We headed down the Mississippi River, stopping at Frontenac State Park on Lake Pepin. We stopped to take a 2.7 mile hike along the top of the bluffs and down at riverside in an area that was famous with explorers for these bluffs. The rock formation at left was very important to the Native Americans in the area. In Winona we stopped to let Bob play 18 holes of disc golf while I caught up with family via telephone (including a talk with Beren in the hospital where he was recovering from surgery to repair a broken hip).

In Lanesboro we camped at the city park which was within walking distance of everything in Lanesboro. The first night a huge Monaco Coach parked next to us. The next night Roxie from the Twin Cities drove up in a Cadillac Escalade in which she sleeps and camps. She was getting a respite from caring for her husband who had acute kidney failure. She had the most amazing quantity of plastic boxes filled with things to camp (table, chairs, little fire pit, lights, etc.)

The first full day in Lanesboro we rented a 16' canoe and paddled down the Root River for 16 miles. The rental place drove us to the put in point after caravaning our cars to the take-out point. The Root River is really beautiful, good current, bluffs, cold water, and we saw two leatherback turtles. We paddled along, stopped twice to swim and eat lunch and after about four hours made it to the take-out point.

Lanesboro is the home of the Commonweal Theater, a regional professional theater. We got tickets for the Man of La Mancha Monday night. It was quite a good production. This is a musical and most of the voices were pretty good. The accompanyist, a pianist, was also an actor and there was the occasional accordion and percussion created with tin cups and plates.

On Tuesday we rented a CD for a self-guided tour of the Amish country near Harmony, which is just south of Lanesboro. The CD explained some things about Amish traditions and guided us to various farm stands and places were quilts, baskets, canned goods and other things were sold. I was initially annoyed at the fact that it was so focused on selling things, but it finally occurred to me that the only way the English (what the Amish refer to outsiders as) could come into a farm yard is if they are invited through the offers of things to buy. We bought some amazing baskets (which seem to be the specialties here), a large bunch of asparagus for $1, a beautiful head of broccoli for 75 cents, and some dill pickles. It was really quite interesting. At one farm a young man was cultivating the corn field with three large draft horses. The Amish plant their corn wider so that the horses can walk between the rows.

In the afternoon we went to Mystery Cave, a state park with the longest cave in Minnesota. There was a great tour which we went on with one other family with some very interested kids. This area is all limestone and in the area of the cave the Root River goes underground, through a terminal sink and flows through the rock to emerge at a place called Seven Springs.
As a result, the cave is very live with water. There are quite a few fossils in the cave of the predecessors of squids and beautiful ponds which are so clear they look only a few feet deep, when in fact they are 10' deep. When the river floods, or there is heavy rain upstream, the cave fills up. It did so only about 2 weeks before we were there. The floods were more severe than those in 2002. The formations are created by the water seeping through the limestone. Each time it floods, the floods erode some of the formations. We took the short one hour tour (though it actually lasted 1 1/2 hours). There are longer tours on the weekends and wild cave tours lasting 4 1/2 hours where you are outfitted with knee and elbow pads and helmets and LED head lamps (which have replace carbide lamps) to go into areas of the cave not on the tours. They are still mapping the cave.

We had intended to go out to dinner, but the restaurant was closed, so we bought a sirloin steak and BBQ'd it and had new potatoes and asparagus. Yummy! The next morning we went to the Pastry Shoppe, recommended by the guy in the Monaco Motor Coach. You go in and when you ask for a menu they tell you they have all the usual breakfast stuff and you just put together what you want. We ordered scrambled eggs (Bob runny, me well-done) and they came exactly as ordered. They were accompanied by delicious Danishes and caramel rolls. It's a definite must go and very inexpensive.

We hope to return to Lanesboro and can highly recommend it for people who like to bike (the 60 mile Root River trail), canoe or walk.
The other two photos are of the Root River and Darwin and I in the canoe (me sporting my dorky hat which does keep the sun off may face and neck.