Eagles over the Mississippi

(Susan here)

Today we said goodbye to Winona and its jacuzzi and travelled along the river, passing through Wabasha (the setting of the movie Grumpy Old Men)* and Lake City (the birthplace of waterskiing)* to Frontenac State Park. We took highway 61 pretty much all the way here except for one of the (flat) ACA detours that took us along Winona County Road 84 through state- and Nature Conservancy-protected dune ecosystems that line the river south of Kellogg:

(This view looks away from the river.)

Entering Frontenac State Park, we were faced with the only real climb we had all day. This park is gorgeous, but I recommend arriving by car.

Many of the visitors to this park are birdwatchers. In fact, you can check out a binoculars and guides for free from the park office, which we would have done if we were going to stay a full day here. But this afternoon, we didn’t even need any binoculars to get some pretty awesome ad hoc birdwatching in. We were standing on an overlook over the river when a bald eagle flew right in front of us, followed not a minute later by another one! (We knew it was a bald eagle because it looked just like that bird at the beginning of the Colbert Report.) Brice, who had only caught the briefest of glimpses of the birds because he was in the midst of ordering us a 1-pound bag of cheddar cheese powder from Amazon on his iPhone, said in mock petulance, “I want another bald eagle!’ And whoosh! There came another one flying in the opposite direction. For someone who’d never knowingly seen a bald eagle in the wild before, getting three all at once was pretty awesome. (Or, who knows, maybe it was the same bird flying in circles.)

*Note that my knowledge of these factual tidbits comes entirely from the “Welcome to X” signs outside each town. For example, did you know that Lansing and New Albin have won a whole lot of Iowa state high school baseball championships? It’s true. And just about every other town in Iowa has one state wrestling champion, whose name and weight class is listed proudly on the sign into town, which means everyone knows exactly how much you weighed in high school. I imagine that if you were that guy still living in that town 30 years later you’d have a lot of people saying to you, “Gee, Bob, you’re looking a little heftier than 138 pounds these days–we should petition the town council to change some of the numbers on that sign around, hardy-har-har” ad infinitum. Lesson: If you’re an athletic boy in Iowa, move to Lansing and go out for baseball.