28th Stop - Minneapolis Minnesota

Blog Post #37 - Written October 23, 2025

Stay: July 13-16, 2025

We stayed at the Lake Elmo Park Reserve campground here, and our good friends, the Deweys, from Cleveland came up from LaCrosse Wisconsin to see us! We were so glad that Tanisha was adventurous enough to make the 2-3 hour drive by herself with 3 kids, just a day or two after getting back from their own extended vacation somewhere else. We were bummed Cameron couldn't make it, but the kids had so much fun hosting their friends for a sleepover in our trailer. It was nice and cozy with all 6 kids stuffed into the back room and Tanisha sleeping on our couch (which pulls out into a bed).

Our first day we went to the Como Park Zoo & Conservatory. The kids had fun together, but I don't remember too much about the zoo itself. I think it was just so blasted hot! We got a few pictures, but not many.  I apparently enjoyed the conservatory/botanical gardens more, since I have lots more pictures from that part (even though it was even hotter inside the greenhouses!).

Z and Q with their friends E and E                           A close up of these magnificent ostriches

 

We enjoyed watching the seals torpedo through the water.                        Found a sloth hiding in the crook of this tree!

 

Dangerous plants these...a bunch of carnivores on the left and thousands of huge inch-long prickles on the right.

Can you guess which of these is vanilla and which is chocolate?

And now for some of my favorites. I ended up finding and listening to a lecture on bonsai trees and their cultivation and care. I had never known the method and science behind them and it was amazing to see the variety of beautiful bonsai.

 

The next day we went for a little hike from Minnehaha Falls to the Mississippi River. 

From our morning hike, we headed to the Bakken Museum, where one man's curiosity, sparked by the Frankenstein movie, led him to invent the pacemaker, build one of the world's largest medical device companies, make lots of money, and start this museum / science center. This was a smaller and 'fancier' science center, but we really enjoyed it. It was big on electricity and making movies/music. It's also fun to see very unique aspects of museums like this, such as the entire section dedicated to Frankenstein and the author, including a frighteningly immersive theater show that I thankfully tried out myself before [not] taking the kids in.

This was probably my favorite toy here haha (I blame my neighbor Kim Berry for introducing me to shock-games). "Electricity Is Life!"  You held both handles and turned one to generate a shockingly strong electrical current through your body. We had way too much fun with it :)

Video: The kids played with this stop-motion moving-picture maker for like an hour. They LOVED making their own movies, taking still-frame shots of their set, then moving their characters around little by little, taking shots along the way.

The Deweys had to start their long drive back home while we were here. Hugs all around!

Again, we were sad to only explore one part of Minnesota. It's such a beautiful state. And from the one little part we did see, I can believe they are the Land of 10,000 Lakes!