SPAM

On our way back from visiting family in Kansas City, we took a short detour and visited the Spam Museum in Austin, MN. It was amazing - we even saw the Minnesota Wild's All-Star goalie (Niklas Backstrom) there. I managed to get this shot of him walking up to the musuem.



Here's us with Sponge Bob and the SPAM can's illegitimate love child.



And one seriously angry pig:



The display at the entrance has thousands of cans of SPAM. I don't remember how many, but it's enough to clog your arteries just by looking at it.



It was a pretty cool museum with a lot of historical exhibits and some games and stuff. Best part was the free samples of Bacon Spam, which convinced us to buy a couple cans for later. And we bought some Spam clothes too. Yay for Spam!

Some more photos are here.

Fort Snelling State Park

Fort Snelling State Park is a short drive away, near the airport and the National Wildlife Refuge in Bloomington. I've been there before and wandered around Pike Island, but today I wanted to walk up to the historic fort and see what that's like. I stopped at the state park visitor center first to figure out which trail went up to the fort.



There were some birds and squirrels dueling at the bird feeders by the visitor center, but my photos were less than spectacular. I'm going to go back and get some better ones some day. On my way to the fort, I was behind a couple of snowshoers. We've had some snow recently so conditions were good for that.



Conditions were also good for me to ignore the obvious trail leading up to the fort in favor of the other trail which simply led me around and beneath the fort without ever catching more than a brief glimpse of the walls. I plodded on, thinking the trail would circle around and go uphill any minute now until I finally caught a clue and turned back. Once back at the trail intersection, a 2 minute walk up the hill got me to the fort. Nice way to waste an hour or so - at least I got some exercise.

Up top the wind and cold combined to make things fairly miserable. I walked around for a little bit and took some photos, then headed back down to the state park. (The fort is actually a state historical site, separate from the state park but directly adjacent to it. I would later learn the fort is closed in the winter so you can only see the outside now anyway.)






I did drive over to the deserted parking lot at the fort entrance but it was getting late so I didn't do anything over there. I'll pick a warmer day with less wind and go walk around some more yet this winter.

You can see a few more photos here.