Road Trip to Roseau: A Minnesota Adventure

The great Minnesota road trip!

Dear reader, its been awhile since I’ve been on a true road trip that really covers some miles! In the lovely month of June, I had the opportunity to accompany my partner on a road trip to Roseau. Roseau is located in the far Northwestern corner of Minnesota, just 10 miles from the Canadian border.

It’s a 6.5-hour drive from where I live in the Twin Cities, roughly 350 miles. St. Paul and Minneapolis are on the southeastern side of the state, close to the border with Wisconsin and just below what I think of as the “waist”. Our road trip was right up the center (and to the left a bit!) See instructive map of my shapely state below.

Our route took us up past St. Cloud, on to US Highway 10 and Minnesota State Highway 89 for many miles north. Highway 89 passes through the Red Lake Indian reservation. On the way home we came down slightly west of there, through Thief River Falls, Park Rapids and the Brainerd Lakes area.

Reminders of road trips past

I had never visited this part of Minnesota—hadn’t been North of Moorhead on the western side of the state or west of Hibbing in the north. (I have taken umpteen road trips to Duluth and along the North shore of Lake Superior, all the way up to Grand Portage.)

Highway 10 is familiar to me. I grew up in Duluth, and often traveled with my family to visit my grandparents in Ottertail County. In earliest years, we drove in our trusty black VW bug. The back seat folded down, and my brother and I lounged back there, in all 3 square feet, with blankets, pillows and games. (And it seemed roomy!)

Road tripping in a VW bug, with ice cream

We drove part of the way on Highway 10. My dad was pretty fond of Dairy Queen (that’s putting it mildly), so we had our DQ stops in certain small towns: I remember Aitkin, Staples and Motley (how great are those town names?).

I also remember how the Buster bar used to have a LOT more fudge in the middle! Ah, those were the days. At least for getting a really fudgy Buster bar.

I read a Star Tribune article about driving on Highway 10 and the small towns along the way, Forget I-94: Hwy. 10 offers trip through Main Streets of Minnesota. I wanted to stop in Royalton, but alas, this was not to be.

On the way up we accidentally drove past it. On the way home it didn’t work out to stop there for dinner, as it would have been 8:30 p.m. The European dinner hour is not so much a thing in small-town Minnesota.

The Call of the Wild!

The further north we drove, the less there was. The population gets smaller and there are fewer towns. Long stretches of road are reservation or state forest.

When not on reservation or forest land, it’s farm country. Fields as far as the eye can see, and what appears to be small family farms.

Spotting horses and cows becomes high entertainment, so it gets pretty exciting when you see somewhere to stop and SHOP. Along a long and lonely stretch of highway, I started to see a series of signs for Gifts O’ the Wild.

I couldn’t wait to get there, these signs were so proliferate and compelling! They promised wild rice for $3.99 a pound, along with countless other enticements.

The promised $3.99-a-pound wild rice turned out to be only for the broken soup rice. A bit of sneaky advertising, but it’s well worth stopping, if just for this parking lot picture.

Gifts O’ the Wild is an extremely long and narrow building, and it’s chock full o’ stuff. They must have been stockpiling Native American handicrafts and kitschy Minnesota-themed souvenirs for years. I especially enjoyed the Paul Bunyan section.

They carry homemade preserves, among them wild chokecherry preserves, including chokecherry syrup!! Which I found thrilling. I haven’t been able to get my hands on this nectar for ages.

My grandma made chokecherry syrup and this is how we ate it:

• Put some chokecherry syrup in the bottom of your cereal bowl.
• Add milk, half-and-half or cream (we used the latter) to taste.
• Stir it all up.
• Dunk bread in it until gone. (My grandma made a fresh, smushy white loaf just for the purpose.)

Red Lake

We drove through the Red Lake Indian Reservation, home to the Red Lake band of Chippewa. Highway 89 goes through the reservation alongside Lower Red Lake for something like 50 miles.

Just FYI, there’s a gas station in Red Lake (the town). There will be no other gas stations for a very long time, so if your tank is low, fuel up.

If you have to use the facilities, or think you might someday, do it now. Really. The next gas station (that might not even be open) will be in Grygla. From Red Lake to Grygla is an hour drive.

Think about it. There are no rest stops on these small highways. (Well, there was one, but it didn’t have a building, or even a porta potty that I could see. I guess it was a parking lot in which to get out and pee by the side of the road.)

Red Lake is beautiful and enormous. It’s actually two connected lakes, Upper and Lower Red Lake. Looking at the Minnesota map, it looks like the largest lake in the state, except for Lake of the Woods.

Sadly, I did not get any photos, as there is nowhere to pull over along the highway, including the side of the road (no verge). Perhaps for a reason. It’s beautiful to see a lake without a ton of development, the usual clutter of a zillion close-packed houses and docks, the noise of boats and jet skis.

Roseau

We ate lunch at a Dairy Queen on the road, so we wanted to find a nice place to have dinner. The Brick House restaurant is in a beautiful building, a renovated Polaris warehouse.

Polaris is an important employer in Roseau. The building houses the restaurant, a Polaris museum, and the Reed River Coffee Company, where I came the next day to hang out.

Roseau is a pretty small town (population 2,633). However, it is the county seat of Roseau County and houses the county courthouse.

Roseau is famous for having spawned some world-class hockey players. Neal, Aaron and Paul Broten are a band of brothers from Roseau who all became professional hockey players.

Neal Broten was a member of the US Olympic hockey team that won the gold in 1980. Broten is the only player to have won the Hobey Baker (US collegiate hockey’s best player), the Olympic Gold Medal and the Stanley Cup. Pretty big stuff in the world of hockey!

We caught a beautiful sunset on the way back to our hotel. The sky just seems endless up there. The land is very open and you can see for miles.

Heading home

We left Roseau in mid afternoon. We decided to drive up to the Canadian border first. Roseau is only about 10 miles from Canada.

Report: nothing to see there. We were not able to go into Canada (no passports with us, and no time). Next slide!

One of the things I love about the independent road trip is being able to stop when you spot something interesting out the window. I just had to get a closer look at this little town hall.

Town halls were commonplace along the road. I don’t know much about the history of the Minnesota town hall, but a number of the ones we passed looked pretty historic. They must have been places for a far-flung rural population to gather.

We took a different route home, and though it wasn’t far from the highway we drove north on, the landscape was very different. Further south, it became gently rolling hills, and we drove through an area with a lot of lakes. Makes you remember why Minnesota is the land of 10,000.

In Park Rapids, we enjoyed the view at an overlook on the Fish Hook River:

Sunsets galore

I suspect we may have had to have Dairy Queen AGAIN for lunch, but for dinner we stopped in Nisswa. This is a pretty touristy area with a lot of resorts, and there were a number of places to eat. We chose a spot right on Gull Lake, where the sunset was beginning just as we were leaving.

Afterward we drove along the lake, and I got pretty excited as the sunset continued to evolve. I took another photo from the beach at the Grand View Resort.

I hope they will forgive me, as we were obviously not staying there and it was probably a private beach! But I’d love to be a guest of this lovely resort. Here’s a link to their website: The Grand View Lodge.

We finally arrived home in Minneapolis about 11 p.m. Ouch, it was a little tough getting up to go to work the next day. But such are the vagaries of the road trip.

Have you been on any road trips lately? Tell me about it in the comments!

I have another Minnesota road trip coming up: to Itasca State Park (Northwest again). Stay tuned! I have actually agreed to go camping at Itasca. Oh boy.

Urban adventure

Check out my urban adventures in New York City. I have Misadventures in the New York City Subway, I encounter Nice New Yorkers, I let you know what you Must See and Eat on your first visit to NYC, and I visit Ancient Egypt at the Met.

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