Day 206 on the road: Revisiting the Minnesota State Fair, Mall of America, a Twins game, the Original Main Street, and the Lake Wobegon Trail

APPLE VALLEY, Minn. – In our weeklong stay in Minnesota, we’ve visited family and friends while I’ve relived some experiences and places that were significant to me when I lived there during my formative teen years.

In the small town of Sauk Centre, where I graduated from high school in 1976, we walked through the downtown area, and drove past the house where my parents lived for 34 years. Most neighborhoods in the city look much the same, but the town has added a McDonald’s and a Walmart since my high school days. We also walked along the shore of Fairy Lake a few miles north of town, where my family rented a summer cottage during the 1970s and ‘80s, and where I swam and sailed my small boat. (See the photo of me on the boat with my senior-year friend Carlos Medina.)

During our time there, I biked for several miles on the Lake Wobegon Trail, which runs through central Minnesota roughly following Interstate 94. The trail follows an old railroad bed, passing by farms and through groves of birch trees and crossing the Sauk River in several places. While I didn’t reach its fictional namesake, I’ve pieced together from the years I listened to “A Prairie Home Companion” that it lies approximately a dozen miles somewhere southeast from my home town, which has it’s won literary claim to fame as the boyhood home of Main Street author Sinclair Lewis.

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In the Twin Cities area where we are now, we spent a few hours yesterday at the Minnesota State Fair, which must be one of the largest in the nation. In one exhibit hall, called “The Miracle of Birth,” we saw new-born piglets feeding at the teats of a big sow. For some reason this made me think of the appropriations process in the U.S. Congress.

And last night, on a beautiful late summer evening, we watched the Minnesota Twins play the Chicago Cubs at the relatively new Target Field in downtown Minneapolis. The outcome of the game wasn’t as important to me (the Cubs won 3-0) as the experience of rejoining 21,000 fans to root for my favorite team. The Twins and I go back 50 summers now, when I was an awkward 13-year-old who had just moved to a new town in central Minnesota with my parents. Before I got to know my new classmates, I would spend hours listening to the Twins games on the radio. Then in high school I would drive down with friends to see them play at the old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington. In a corner of the Mall of America, which is built of the site of the old stadium, you can see a brass home plate resting on the same spot where I watched Hall-of-Famer Rod Carew line base hits from my seat in the bleachers back in the mid-1970s.

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From here we’ll travel tomorrow to Wisconsin, and then on to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Lake Superior.