Tag Archives: Driftless

Driftless 2024

What a time! We went down to the LaCrosse, Wisconsin area for vacation again and it was amazing. The driftless is such a wonderful place filled with fun hikes, neat amish things, and, reasonably priced lodging and food.

I think this is the third year we’ve skipped the north shore. Far too many people. The costs were disproportionately high compared to what we received. I’m happy we found a new place for our fall trips!

Overall, this year was a lot like last year. Drove to Pikes Peak State Park in Iowa, visited a lot of Amish bakeries, swam a lot, hiked a bit, and, enjoyed the good weather.

Biggest conclusions this year: 1) we actually only like one Amish bakery located in Iowa. Next year I think we’re going to stay nearby, 2) the day of the dead celebration surrounded by farm fields seven miles east of the tiny town of Viola was amazing. How lucky we were to find such a place to have fun. It was surreal.

The Amish items were still fabulous deals. An entire homemade apple pie for $10, 40lbs of honey crisp apples for $18, and so on. We were lucky we were able to find so many wonderful things to purchase!

La Crosse is an interesting town in of itself. The town is only 50,000 or so people but the metro area is 170,000, so, the services, lodging, and, restaurants the town offers is disproportionate to it’s size. We love visiting the La Crosse area!

Until this year, I had not realized one of the reasons why I like the La Crosse area so much – it’s because it’s another place that has the “this was something important at one time” feel like the South East of the USA and other post-industrial areas of the US I’ve visited. I really like visiting these types of areas because these places were once far more important than they are now and they have all the evidence to prove it.

Once again, we were too early for the fall colors and the fall colors occurring weren’t great due to the drought. Instead of turning beautiful shades of yellow and red, the leaves were just crumpling and shriveling up. Oh well, not a huge deal since everything else was so awesome.

Enjoy the photos!

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Driftless 2023

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We were fortunate to have another great visit to the driftless. We spent our time in the LaCrosse area this year and were stunned by the shear number of amazing things to do in the area.

We were extremely lucky to stumble across some wonderful Amish stuff. We ended up buying 40lbs of Honeycrisp apples for $16 and purchased a huge amount of wonderful baked items like pumpkin pies and donuts. The Amish stole the show and we were super lucky.

Someone asked me, “what will you do with 40lbs of apples?”. It turns out five apple pies, two apple crisps, a large strudel, two apple breads, and a set of apple muffins only takes about 30lbs of apples. This has been a fun and delicious problem to solve!

The hiking was a lot of fun too. Wildcat Mountain State Park, Indian Mounds Effigy National Monument, and river hikes, and, other wonderful areas were just beautiful. The weather and great and there weren’t many people about – our time in nature was well spent and the hikes were a lot of fun for all three of us.

We look forward to going back next year. Next year we’ll be prepared with cooler and other items to make sure we can bring home all the wonderful Amish stuff – like meats, eggs, dairy, and, everything else :).

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The Driftless 2022

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We ‘found’ a new part of Minnesota which checks all of our boxes: decent hiking, great, views, reasonable cost, decent amenities and it’s not too far from the twin cities!

The area is called ‘The Driftless’ because it remained unglaciated during the last ice age and has some very unique scenery, animal life, and geographical features – like an utter lack of lakes. I had heard about the area but only heard about the bike trail through the Lanesboro area, I had no idea the Driftless extended to Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois. We explored the Rushford, Houston, Lanesboro and surrounding area and had a blast.

The surprises were many: the hiking in Great River Bluffs State Park was wonderful, the Amish desserts / baked items sold on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere was wonderful, there are at least two very fun caves to visit, and the restaurants were halfway decent too!

We visited Niagara Cave (narrow and tall) and Mystery Cave (wide and short) – both were awesome for different reasons. It was neat to learn how the water run off made the caves in the area.

We visited the Driftless because the fall colors were completely missing on the north shore. We were still a bit early for the fall colors in southern Minnesota but we did see some fall colors and it was delightful.

The best part of the entire trip was the utter lack of people and low cost of lodging, food, and activities. We go to the North Shore every year and it’s usually wonderful! Since COVID kicked off the North Shore has remained stunningly beautiful and wonderful to visit but lodging, food, and activities have become super expensive and 100% not worth it. It’s now more economical to fly somewhere cool for a short weekend then go to the North Shore. I think I’m sensitive to ripping off tourists simply because I grew up in a tourist trap that offered a terrible deal for a tourist’s money – this year was the year where I finally gave up on paying North Shore rates – we did not get 40% more enjoyment out of the lodging costing 40% more this year versus last.

We are beyond excited to find a new place to explore. Next year we plan on exploring some of the Wisconsin Driftless.

Enjoy the photos!

Chris W.

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