The Land of Lakes

We entered back into the lower 48 via Warroad, Minnesota. Yeah! Warroad was a pleasant surprise, pretty little municipal park on the shores of Lake of the Woods. They have a nice bike path around the town and along the shore. Part of the path runs through a high marshy area and there right in front of me was another bear. Holy smokes! I stopped dead on the bike. Really did not think I would be seeing any more bears and certainly not this close to a town. Good thing I was far enough away to slowly turn around and get the heck out of there. Turns out they have also had a few cougar sightings as well on this path. No more bike riding for me in Warroad! One morning I woke up early and got some great pictures of the sun coming up over the lake.

Next we headed to International Falls which has not had waterfalls since they dammed up the river for a humongous paper mill in the early part of the 20th century. Hmmm, maybe they should have changed the name? I was not overly impressed with the town itself but it is close to Voyageurs National Park. This national park is mostly water and is best seen from that perspective. After all, northern Minnesota is most notably known for its many lakes including the Boundary Waters which is the border between Canada and the US. Everyone has a boat, canoe or kayak except for us. We did not have the foresight to line up a boat and decided to head over to the North Shore of Lake Superior.

Turns out as we were heading to the coast we were on the southern edge of a wild fire that has been burning since August. It was kinda of scary when we first saw the smoke cloud on the horizon. We were not aware ( no tv or wifi at the last park) that the northern half of Minnesota was on fire with the Pagami Creek fire until we got to the Ely area and saw the smoke. Whew, we made it to the coast and landed in the Two Harbors area. Originally, we were planning on heading north to Grand Marias but opted out because of the fire.

I almost thought about naming this post "Land of Flies" instead of lakes. Somewhere in Warroad or International Falls we got an infestation of flies. Yuck! I guess along with all of those beautiful lakes comes a lot of black flies! We were able to get rid of them but never could figure out how they actually got inside the Biff.