Minnesota

We have been here at River View Campground in Owatonna, Mn for the past four days and are making plans to head south into Iowa tomorrow. We are still traveling with our Cajun buddies Terry and Kathy Derouen and are very much enjoying their company.  But before I get ahead of myself, I need to mention our stay in  Wisconsin. From what I could learn, there were not a lot of scenic areas to go see or visit in Wisconsin other than the big tourist attraction in Wisconsin  Dells. The Dells is primarily a summer attraction area with many indoor and outdoor water parks as well as Duck rides, and scenic cruises down the Wisconsin River to view the Dell rock formations. It reminded me a lot of the tourist trap area in Gatlinburg and Pigeon  Forge. We had just about seen all the water and rocks we needed after being on, in, and around Lake Superior for so long, so we chose just to ride around and sight see instead. There's also an abstract attraction nearby called House on the Rocks built by an architect with unusual ideas and attracts a lot of folks, but at $29/apiece, we decided to pass on that too. We didn't do anything really blog worthy during our time in Wisconsin but did enjoy our stay there, which brings us to where we are now in Owatonna, Mn.

Owatonna is about 50 miles south of Minneapolis and is close to Interstate 35. We are staying at the River View Campground which is a pretty nice park that also accepts Passport America, so we are staying here for about $20/night for full hook ups. We decided to stay at this location because it's halfway between the Mall Of America and the Winnebago factory in Forest City, Iowa. We Traveled into Bloomington Sunday to check out the Mall of America we've heard so much about for many years. First, let me say that it being huge is an under statement. We went into the west end and probably didn't cover 25% of it before we had seen enough and retreated! It would probably take a week to cover it all. The mall employs over 12,000 people and has 3 to 4 million visitors each year.  It has 4 levels with over 400 stores and restaurants, not to mention the amusement park, aquarium, swimming pools and ice skating facility. It's very impressive and has just about every store you can imagine, but if you decide to visit, be sure and bring a sack full of money as everything we saw was pretty expensive. Monday we traveled south on I-35 to visit the Winnebago factory, which is the largest motor home manufacturing facility in the country. I thought sure Terry and Kathy were going to pick out a new one while there, but they didn't have the right color!  I told them I would buy them one just as soon as my lottery numbers hit! Seriously, it's a first class operation with Winnebago manufacturing about everything but the chassis that goes into a motor home and employees over 2400 folks at their Forest City plant that covers over 60 acres. They have recently ventured into the towable RV market with the purchase of SunnyBrook RV in Indiana. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to take photos, so we can't visually share our experience with our buddies in blogger land, but will say the factory tour was informative, interesting and very worthwhile.  Yesterday and today have pretty much been catch up days where we caught up on our cleaning and maintenance chores, which is a necessity now and then. 

Tomorrow, we're pulling up anchor and heading south to Amana, Iowa about 200 miles south of here. We'll probably stay about 6 days there and should have some interesting stuff to share. Oh by the way, the weather here has been perfect for the last several weeks with day time highs in the 70 & 80's and lows in the 50's. I'm sure it's not long before the bottom drops out, but sure has been pleasant.

Entrance to River View Campground

Our Site B-2. That's Terry and Kathy's motor home next to us.

There shouldn't ever be any shortage of corn. We've seen ions of acres of corn.

Sign over main entrance to Mall of America

Inside west entrance. There are 4 levels.

Nickelodeon Park where there are roller coasters, zip lines and various rides.

Partial directory of stores in mall. It took 2 more panels like this one to list them all.

Main entrance into park.

Want some gourmet snacks for Fido?

Lego section of mall that was way cool.

Partial directory of attractions on level 4.

They even had a Bubba Gump's. Didn't see Forest though!

One of the lobby areas.

This fella was luring folks into the aquarium.

Hard to believe all the figures were made from Legos.

I thought it was interesting that the Apple store and Microsoft store were across the aisle from each other.

On the banks of the Mississippi River in Lake City, Mn. It's supposed to be the widest part of the entire Mississippi River.

Park on the river.

Pretty sunset on the way back to Owatonna.

Pretty sunbeams in the sunset.  Goodbye from Minnesota!