Travels with Cece, Eric and Sarah: It's A Wonderful Life in Fergus Falls

In Sioux Falls, when I mentioned that I was going to Fargo to a woman, she expressed surprise that I was voluntarily going to Fargo (a lot of people do that) and invited me to her lake house in northern Minnesota on the way from Fargo to the Mall of America. But, I had to turn down the invitation because if I added eight hours or more to the last leg of the trip to the MOA, I would pretty much be on Sarah’s bad side for the rest of my life. The clock was ticking as we left Fargo. Sarah had imposed escalating penalties for lateness. It was like having court fines that double every day and next thing you know you owe a 12-year old millions of dollars. Against the backdrop of ever increasing fines, I could make only one stop on the way to Bloomington. We stopped in Fergus Falls, Minnesota because we liked the alliterative name. Come to find out the following: there are no falls in Fergus Falls (or so we were told); the town looks just like the town in “It’s a Wonderful Life;” it is the county seat of Otter Tail County; it has a large geriatric population and a coffee shop that makes a banging café au lait and great spice cookies. The Sarah clock continued to tick so after a quick stop at the Otter Tail County Museum, it was off to the MOA. I made it with five minutes to spare.

The MOA is obviously huge given that it is the largest enclosed mall in the United States. The children had great fun. There is an amusement park in the MOA, plus an aquarium. Cece took Eric to the amusement park for 3.5 hours and after that he announced: “This is the best mall ever.” I took Sarah shopping. What can I say about how big the mall is other than the fact that it has 3 Bath and Body Works stores? Do we really need a Bath and Body Works store that sells only the brand’s home products? I don’t know the answer, but there is one in the MOA. There are all the same stores as in a garden-variety mall just more of them. But, Sarah and I had a lot of fun because shopping is fun. It’s just that simple. At the MOA, we saw the oddest thing that we saw during our entire trip -- a group of adult men and women having a “Build A Bear” party. There were no children in the group. We still can’t figure out what that was about. I mean adults do not build stuffed animals even for work-related team building events so this remains a mystery. We had to drag Sarah out of the MOA and I promised to bring her back next year, and we probably will do it because I have to get back to Wisconsin and given that it is right next to Minnesota, it should all work out.

Talk about an underrated state and you are talking about Wisconsin. It’s big – not Texas big, but big for a state east of the Mississippi. It takes 7.5 hour to drive from the MOA to Chicago (our next stop) and most of the drive takes place on the southeast diagonal through Wisconsin. There is a lot to talk about with Wisconsin. First, the bad news: I got a speeding ticket. Really, Wisconsin should be a 75 mph state, but alas, it is a 65 mph state. The good news is that the trooper who gave me the ticket was really nice and told me where to get some great cheese, etc. in the area. The food in Wisconsin is super – the cheese, ice cream, maple syrup, sausage, cheese bread, etc. – yummy, yummy. The women are just a little bit bigger – not fat, just bigger and stronger looking and I loved that. Baldwin, Wisconsin – another super cute small town with a great coffee shop. The weird thing about Baldwin is that every teenager I met there had these Katy Perry anime character eyes. I thought that they were all on drugs but then I realized that I was looking at wide-eyed innocence. Either that or they were all sporting the new circle lenses that girls use to make their eyes look really big. The coffee shop in Baldwin (The Hazelnut Tree) is also a gift shop and Eric, the only one who went in with me, insisted on getting Cece a gift. Strangely enough the gift was two bottles of Coca Cola and lo and behold right before we gave the gift to her he told me “I think that two sodas are too much for Aunt Cece. I think I will keep one for me and Sarah.” I found out that Wisconsin is the water park capital of America. I have never seen more and the Dells area of Wisconsin is full of beautiful lakes and the aforementioned water parks. Check them out at this link. Next stop: Madison. This is a beautiful capitol city, with a pretty lake right in the middle of town, crazy “college town liberal” people, nice restaurants and just an all around nice place. I could totally live there. I e-mailed Andrew a picture of the state capitol and he e-mailed me back with “Wow, that’s a nice capitol.” I e-mailed back “What were you expecting a dairy barn?” I think that we all know Andrew’s answer.

We had great weather (excluding the hail, rain and snow in Yellowstone and even that was not as bad as it could have been) for the entire trip. Every time, we would get to a town, the people would tell us that they were just finishing up a few days of bad weather. Now, we were heading to the biggest city in the Midwest (“If you don’t know by now, I’m talking about Chi town”) which would prove to be no different. Apparently, we were driving behind a series of tornadoes that were moving through the upper Midwest. Just outside of Rockford, Illinois, a random guy approached us at a gas station and started talking to us about tornadoes. Have you ever noticed how everyone in Illinois other than people in Chicago has a slight southern drawl? I noticed it in 2007, but I attributed to the fact that I was in southern Illinois, but what is up with the area between the Wisconsin border and Chicago. Anyway, we arrived in Chicago at around 8:30 p.m. after a day during which tornado warning sirens had apparently gone off 3 times. Despite some frazzled nerves, Oprah’s soon to be former home was looking good. We went out for Chicago-style pizza which I happen to think is pretty disgusting, but the children and Cece loved it. Sarah pronounced Giordano’s pizza as “the best pizza ever!” We’ll have to agree to disagree. The next day, we went off to the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower and also had the good luck to see one of the bridges over the Chicago River opening. Eric loved that. Then it was bye, bye to “Chi town, Chi town, the city with best skylines.”

While in Chicago, we realized that we had eaten Buffalo wings a lot during our trip so we decided that our next major stop would be Buffalo, New York so we could have the wings at their place of origin, plus Eric would get to see Niagara Falls because he had pronounced the Lower Falls at Yellowstone to be “way big” and we wanted to show him another “way big” waterfall. So change of plans – no more trip to Detroit, Canada and Rochester, New York. Instead, we were off to Buffalo by way of Cleveland with a stop for lunch in southern Michigan.