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Our 2024 Minnesota State Parks Trip--Prologue
6/3/2024
The Lead-up
The genesis for this trip idea doesn't go back very far; no more than two years, I would estimate. One day as I was reviewing some of the pictures I had shot of various Minnesota State Parks, I thought "How cool would it be to visit all of them?"
This didn't seem to be an impossible task--far from it. Minnesota has 65 of them, all located within a 5-6 hour drive of Proctor. I/we could easily accomplish the task of visiting them all with a series of day trips; being retired has made the task achievable. But what about Patty? She was still working and some time left in her work career. This would be a sort of selfish, self-centered goal if I left her out of it, no doubt! Certainly she would have to (and she most assuredly would want to) join me on these trips.
With Patty still working, we could only do daily trips on a weekend or by Patty taking vacation. On the topic of visiting a Minnesota State Park on a weekend, have you ever visited a park like Gooseberry on a summer or early autumn weekend? "Busy" may not be a strong enough word. Experience has taught us that visiting these parks on a weekday is much more enjoyable than on a weekend.
The idea soon followed that we could break these visits into a series of shorter trips of no longer than two weeks, I could section off Minnesota into certain geographic regions; southeast, southwest, northwest and northeast. With this idea in mind, the research and painstaking review of maps began, aided by the book "Minnesota State Parks".
After coming up with some rudimentary itineraries, we decided to commence our journey with a trip to southeast Minnesota. I came up with the idea of "city hopping" where we would travel to a city, hit those state parks within easy driving distance and then move on to another city after 2-4 days. This would minimize the amount of driving required. But this created two problems. First, there would be "dead days" when you checked out of a hotel, drove to the next city and checked into a new hotel. No state parks would be visited on those days, lengthening the overall number of days in a trip. The other (and in Patty's eyes, the more importamt) drawback would be the required packing everything up into our suitcases and then unpacking at the next city. And I tended to agree with her on this point that it would be a royal pain in the ass to be changing hotels three or four times in a 10-12 day span.
What was the alternative? In respect to our planned southeast Minnesota trip, I researched how much driving would be required by staying at just one hotel (in Rochester in this case) and hitting two state parks each day (originally there were 14 parks we wanted to visit during this trip). There would be no dead days and we would shave one full day off our trip. The only downside is that it would require driving about 200 more miles over the course of the trip. We felt this wasn't a big deal in light of the advantages so this was the course we decided on.
Researching various Rochester hotels, we kept coming up upon the Fairfield Inn & Suites Rochester Mayo which was nearby the interchange of US 52 and US 16. TripAdvisor (I know, take those reviews with a grain of salt sometimes--Yelp is even worse) rated it #2 in Rochester's hotels. The biggest advantage was that with the Extended Stay rate (we would be there for eight nights) we could get a King Suite for just over $120/night!
One of the things which had always bugged me was finding our way around various state parks. Avenza Maps to the rescue! They have both Apple and Android versions. With this app, you can download maps of pretty much anything, although I was only interested in Minnesota State Park maps for now. And these are free! They are zoomable on your iPhone and supposedly accurate to within three feet. Simply follow the blue dot showing your position and you're set. Also, if you're in an area where you have no cell coverage, this app works perfectly in Airplane Mode. I tested it out in Jay Cooke State Park and it was remarkably accurage. These maps mimic whas you find on the Minnesota DNR website so if you're familiar with those, you'll be quite comfortable with this app.
Within a week we'd be packed and ready to go!
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