The Great Northern Minnesota Adventure

One day, Carrie started talking all about this place in the US that you have to go through Canada to get to. I didn't think much about it till we decided to spend a weekend exploring the Northwest Angle and tossed our camping gear in the trunk and headed out of town on a Friday after work. You might ask yourself why we would spend HOURS in the car just to go to this unknown place called the Northwest Angle. And that's a valid question. Here's why. You have to drive through Canada just to get to a part of Minnesota. AND, it is the most northern point in the continental 48 states. Now, THAT'S pretty cool.

So, we drove about half way up on Friday night (4 hours that night) through a fantastic little town (Walker) where we had dinner and then headed out to find a camp site. We ended up on Cass lake.

Morning on Cass lake before we broke camp and headed for Canada/US/Canada/US.

On our way up to the border, we found this fantastic little hole in the wall in Gyrgla (don't worry, we had to ask how to pronounce it too). My toast was this delicious homemade wheat bread with a combo of whole wheat, coarse ground wheat, and rye. It was so good (and I'm so bad at making my own bread), I asked if I could buy a loaf. It came in handy later that day at a border crossing.

After the delicious breakfast and a few more hours of driving through beautiful scenery (where we saw a black bear cub run across the road right in front of us), we finally made it across the US into Manitoba, Canada.

This was the most unusual border crossing I'd been to. We had to CALL into the border patrol and pick which country we wanted to talk to based on whether we were going in or out of the Northwest angle.

And, this was what we found in the Northwest Angle.... fishing. Not surprising, we didn't have a boat or fishing licenses. So, we spent about 10 minutes up there and headed out.

But, when we got back to the MN/Manitoba border that we had crossed earlier, we found this.... markers showing the actual US/Canada border. Forget standing in two states, I stood in two countries.

And then we took a little run/frolic along the border because when do you actually get the chance to do that on an international border? Pretty much never. Carrie's awesome photography skills caught one of my heel clicks

The previous border crossing was fun, the next, not so much. I guess crossing an international border 4 times in less than 3 hours must throw up some red flags because they spent a good amount of time strip searching our car to see if we were trying to smuggle illegal items back into the US. They had a hard time believing that two girls would road trip up to the NW Angle just to see what was up there. That's where the loaf of bread came in handy. They commented on it and then we could tell the story of stopping in Gyrgla... breakfast... buying the loaf of bread. Plus, they didn't find anything illegal in the car. So, we got a fantastic reference for a place to eat in International Falls from one of the border guards.

Along the way to International Falls (often the coldest place in the continental 48 states), we found Wally the Walleye.

And we stopped in a National Park - Voyager's NP.

Ate dinner at Sha Sha's (a definite must if you are ever in International Falls)

And camped the night on the edge of Voyager's National Park.