Saturdays are for Adventures

Had a fabulous time on the North Shore of Lake Superior today with my mom. Below is probably one of my favorite photos. More to come!

Badlands NP

Well, I’ve made it through the first couple weeks of the Fall semester. It hasn’t been too bad. Besides dealing with my cold, it’s been downright pleasant. I was going through some photos from the epic summer of 2010. I came across this beautiful photo from Badlands National Park in South Dakota. I just felt compelled to share it. I’ve had a touch of the wanderlust lately and I feel like I should start thinking about my next travel adventure. Thankfully, I’ll be taking a microadventure up the North Shore this weekend to check out the start of the changing leaf colors.  You can check out my first and second trips to Badlands NP.

Summer Road Trip – Universities

Wow, this summer has just flown by! I’ve spent most of my time working (so many fun projects) and crafting, reading, and Netflix binging during my free time. In July, I went on vacation for 2 glorious weeks. I visited family and friends while roadtripping out to see my dear friend Kristen who lives in northeastern Ohio. I had great weather and great driving the whole time. My favorite accomplishment of the whole trip (and I think it earned admiration from many people) – not checking my work email the ENTIRE time I was out of the office. Talk about awesome.

Anyway, one of the accidental themes of my trip was Universities. I visited 5 of them. Yes, 5. I love checking out other campuses, walking around and taking photos. It’s rather relaxing. I visited St. Mary’s University and University of Notre Dame both in South Bend, IN, along with Kent State University, Baldwin-Wallace University (both in NE Ohio), and University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As I was planning my trip, I purposefully scheduled a night to stay in South Bend, Indiana. It was a half-way point in my driving (Madison, WI-Akronish, OH) and it’s the home to the University of Notre Dame. Once I booked my hotel, I realized it was on the campus of St. Mary’s University – Notre Dame’s sister school. I walked around both university campuses and took so many photos. I had lovely weather, so I just soaked up the atmosphere at both places. Both universities are Catholic and I enjoyed seeing how the religious imagery was incorporated around campus.

St Mary’s University

St Mary’s University

Fighting Irish

Library at University of Notre Dame

Administration building at University of Notre Dame

Once I made it to Kristen’s she showed me around Kent State University, where she went to grad school and now works. Another beautiful campus. We also walked around the May 4th Memorial and I learned how such a painful part of the campus’s history is used and talked about to this day.

Kent State University

Part of the May 4th Memorial at Kent State

Later in my visit with Kristen, she took me around Baldwin-Wallace University near Cleveland where she did a stint as an intern during grad school. No great pictures from that visit because it was raining and we just drove through the campus.

The last campus I visited was UW-Madison. I met up with some friends on The Terrace of Memorial Union for a mini-ACPA reunion. It was nice to catch up with them. I also just enjoyed the summer weather, sitting by the lake, and walking around campus. I forgot how much I love the atmosphere of that campus. I worked at UW for a year during my grad school internship, but I didn’t totally get to enjoy working there. I was so busy with doing stuff for my internship (plus working another job, living a decent commute away, and finishing up grad school), that I didn’t really take advantage of being at UW. If I were ever to take the plunge back into working at a Division 1, Research institution, UW might be the place to do it. However, I have no plans on doing that anytime soon.

UW-Madison

The Terrace & Lake Mendota at UW-Madison

Overall, I loved this portion of my trip. My campuses visited list is now up to 24!

Announcements – Just want to wish a few fellow bloggers congratulations!

• Laura started a new blogging venture called A Two Dog Life. Loving it already!
• Stephanie welcomed a bundle of joy named George into the world.

Favorite Travel Souvenirs

I’m guessing everyone has their favorite souvenirs they like to collect while traveling. Just to have a momento of the experience you had at a place. Generally, I tend to take a lot of photos. However, there are also a number of other items that I like to either purchase or freebies I try to make sure to pick up. For me, these are great because they can be displayed, could be great for scrapbooking, are flat (I generally don’t have a ton of extra space for souvenirs when traveling), are inexpensive or free, and have some information about the place I visited. I hope to give you some good ideas of things you might want to pick up on your next adventure.

National Park specific: Park newspapers, Maps, & Passport cancellations – all of which can be picked up at the visitor center.

Park newspapers are great for information and any special events or updates happening in the park for that particular year or season.

Maps are fantastic for navigating around the park as they highlight spots of interest, visitor centers, trails, camping, etc. The maps generally also have some information about the park.

Bonus news: park newspapers and maps are FREE! Also, I like to use the information from the maps and newspapers when blogging. I generally give a little bit of information about the park’s history and reason for existence. It’s nice to get it correct. 🙂

Passport cancellations are another great way to commemorate a visit to a National Park. Beyond the initial $9 investment for the passport, these cancellation stamps are free. Each visitor center in each NPS location has its own stamp with the name of the park, location of the visitor center, and date. There are also usually some fun stamps that are probably meant for little kids or the junior ranger program…I’ve put those in my NPS Passport too. 🙂 You could probably do this momento completely for free and keep all the stamps in some sort of book. However, the official passport has a listing of all NPS locations for each region in the country. Keeps everything nice and organized.

Brochures are another great freebie you can pick up. Often times, these are informative of activities or sights to see. The two in the picture above are from a visit I made to the Milwaukee Art Museum. I made sure to grab the brochure for the Posters of Paris exhibit (which was fantastic, by the way) since I couldn’t take pictures in that part of the museum.

Postcards! Postcards are a great little momento to keep for yourself or to send to someone back home. Usually, postcards are fairly cheap and you can get 3 or 4 for about $1. If you pick out bigger than normal postcards or they are fancier in some way, they’ll cost you a little bit more. Postcards can also remind you of something specific that happened on the trip. Take for example the postcard of the donkeys from Custer State Park. Normally, I probably wouldn’t have picked that one up, but Julie and I had a donkey encounter on our trip. We were stuck in a mini traffic jam with the donkeys and we had one leave some snot on the window. It was a hilarious incident that I really didn’t want to forget. So, I got a postcard.

Magnets are another favorite thing I like to pick up. These will cost you a little bit more, around $4-6 each. My fridge is littered with travel magnets holding up pictures and things to remember. They are constant reminders of how much fun I had at each place and also how much I want to travel to other places.

Finally, Stickers! Stickers are a fairly new souvenir item for me. I started noticing them as I began traveling more on the North Shore of Lake Superior. If you happen to be traveling this way, the Lake Superior Trading Post in Grand Marais has a fantastic collection of stickers to pick through. I’ve taken to displaying most of my stickers on my travel box (a box that houses a lot of travel items such as maps, visitor guides, or travel articles that may be needed for or could influence future travel). Also, the National Parks have official stickers that can go along with the Passport cancellations. I’ve been keeping my most recent ones for scrapbooking purposes.

I hope I’ve given you some new ideas of travel souvenirs to pick up…especially if you’re a scrapbooker of some type. I will admit that I generally don’t collect ALL these items for every place I visit. Take for example, my trip to the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore this past weekend. I picked up the park newspaper, map, 2 visitor center cancellations, a magnet, and a few stickers. The next time I visit, it’s so darn close that I’m pretty sure I’ll visit again, I’ll probably only pick up the freebie items at the visitor centers.

Until next time, have fun souvenir collecting!

Mini Waves

Julie is visiting me all week and we took a mini roadtrip in Wisconsin yesterday that included Amnicon Falls State Park, Ashland, Bayfield, and the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. Here’s one of my favorite photos of the day from a stop at Meyers Beach in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore area. Such a beautiful day!

It’s All in the Rainbow

This past week has been wonderful. Why? I’ve been on vacation with my sister, celebrating her recent Master’s graduation from UWM. We did a similar trip out to the Black Hills in South Dakota to celebrate my graduation from UW-Whitewater. We (well, I really) had had a grand plan for a roadtrip out to Virginia. To be honest it was a nice dream, and the closer we got to it, it was very clear that the trip plan was ambitious for our time frame and more costly than we could afford. Insert Plan B, a roadtrip up the North Shore of Lake Superior. We’ve already had numerous adventures up the shore, but this would give us a chance to stay further north than Duluth for a couple days and explore even more. We decided to use Grand Marais as our home base for most of the week. Grand Marais is this adorable little town right on Lake Superior about 45 minutes from the Canadian border. I have plenty to share with you about our trip, and today I want to share with you all the wonderful rainbows I saw. One of the themes for our trip was waterfalls. They were everywhere! Since we had so much late snow, and a couple recent days of rain, the rivers were crazy full. You’d hear the waterfalls long before you saw them and once you were there, you could hear nothing else. The roar was, well, loud. It was also a beautiful sound. I just couldn’t get over all the water…especially because I’ve seen some of these waterfalls in the past year with hardly any water flowing over them.

Anyway, on to the rainbows. Because of the intense amount of water flowing over the waterfalls, there was a lot of spray. A lot…especially at High Falls in Grand Portage State Park where we were just doused with water spray (even before we got to the actual waterfall). The combination of the spray and the sunshine made for a the perfect setting for rainbows. The rainbows just added a spark of magic to the already wonderful setting. So, here they are, captured at three different parks.

Rainbow #1 is faint, but it’s there – Kakabeka Falls Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada

Rainbow #2 at High Falls in Grand Portage State Park

High Falls is part of the Pigeon River, which forms the border between Minnesota and Canada. The rocks on the left side of the photo are Minnesota, and the right are Canada. Pretty much got rained on with the icy cold water spray at this waterfall. So worth it to see the full rainbow that was happening.

Rainbow #3 at Cascade River State Park

The rocks are hiding the waterfall, but it’s there. Such a fun couple of days. I’ll be back with more about our trip. 🙂

Until then, have you seen waterfall rainbows? If so, where?

Power of Water

After today, I’m in awe of the power of water and Lake Superior. Well, let’s face it, I’ve been in love with Lake Superior since I moved to Duluth almost 2 years ago. Today we had some crummy weather…rain, chilly, and windy. However, that combo has quite the impact on Lake Superior. The waves were intense today as I drove up the North Shore towards Grand Marais. I spent a lot of time just listening to the water. It was a very beautiful loud crashing sound.

I’m enjoying a glorious week of vacation this week. Yay! Just wanted to share some of the sights from today.

Gooseberry Falls…very, very full

Huge wave crashing at Cascade River State Park

Summer Revisited: Voyageurs National Park

I hate to admit this, but winter is closing in on us. I don’t know if I’m quite ready for the snow and a true Duluth winter. Instead of dwelling on this fact, I am choosing to relive one of the highlights of my summer that I didn’t really have a chance to share here on the blog. During the 4th of July weekend when my sister was visiting me, we made the trek northward to check out Voyageurs National Park. After I was bitten by the National Park bug a few years ago, I was super excited when I realized that I now live just a short 3 hour drive from a National Park…wooooo!

Voyageurs Sign

Here is a blurb about Voyaguers NP right from the NPS map/information handout:

“As the fur trade expanded westward, it relied heavily upon the voyageurs, or French-Canadian canoemen, who moved beaver and other pelts and trade goods between Montreal and the Canadian Northwest. Voyageurs depended upon native North Americans for furs, guide services, clothing, food, and medicine. The route these adventuresome men, who paddled up to 16 hours per day, became so established that the 1783 treaty ending the American Revolution specified that the international boundary should follow their ‘customary waterway’ between Lake Superior and Lake of the Woods. Today, Voyaguers National Park, established in 1975, adjoins a 56-mile stretch of that Voyageurs Highway.”

There’s your history lesson for the day.

Our lunchtime view

To really see a lot of Voyageurs NP, you need a boat (which many people were doing that day). Since Julie and I were only at the park for the day, we decided just to use our feet to explore. We went to the Ash River Visitor Center. We chatted with a really nice park ranger who gave us the down-low on the hiking in the area. I also got another stamp for my NPS Passport. After our visit to the Visitor Center we found a picnic table for lunch with an awesome view of Kabetogama Lake. Beautiful July day. After lunch, we headed towards our trail, the Blind Ash Bay Trail, loaded up on bug spray (deer flies were in full force), and set off for a couple mile hike.

View of Kabetogama Lake early on our hike

The narrow trail

The trail itself was narrow and filled with rocks and roots. Julie and I had to hike single file for about 99% of the hike. I led and called out when there was debris to watch for. At one point I called out “big ass ferns” because the ferns were about as high as my waist and covering the trail. The only wildlife sighting we had was a pheasant that scared the poo out of us as it flew away out of a nearby bush or tree.

Blind Ash Bay

Our destination for the hike was Blind Ash Bay. It was so peaceful…as was our hike. There were almost zero people. We only came across a family and a couple. Overall, it was fun to explore a small portion of Voyageurs NP. You can bet since the park is so close, I’ll be visiting it again. I may have to make it a summer tradition…

The woods near Blind Ash Bay

Are you finding yourself revisiting fun times from the summer?

The Perfect View

Last weekend my parents came to visit me in Duluth. The previous weekend they headed out on a week long roadtrip out to the Black Hills in South Dakota, then looped into Wyoming and Montana and came back east through North Dakota and Minnesota. We had a perfectly relaxing weekend. We ate out a couple times, did a little shopping (my mom got a Nook from Barnes & Noble!!!), and did a little sightseeing. We decided to check out Enger Tower in west Duluth. I had heard that you get an awesome view of the city and Lake Superior. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who wanted to hang out at the tower and subsequent park. A wedding had just finished, people were having picnics, and other people were just doing some sightseeing. I can definitely see myself coming back to this park to take photos for either sunrise or sunset. Check out these views!

Lift bridge & Park Point

The Lift Bridge from a different viewing spot in the park.

Shore of eastern Duluth

Since my parents were technically still on vacation, I offered to take their picture with Enger Tower in the background. And by “offer” I mean: go stand over by those rocks so I can take your picture…now shift a little this way. The shifting got a little complicated. 🙂

Mom & Dad

The park area surrounding the tower had some beautiful flower beds. You should know by now if you’ve read the blog for really any length of time, I’m a sucker for a pretty flower.

How did you spend your weekend? Do any local sightseeing? Photograph any flowers?

UC Berkeley Up Close

So here’s my last post about my trip to Berkeley in June. Overall, I had a wonderful time. It turned out a little different than I had initially planned for, and that’s okay. I loved that I had time to thoroughly explore the UC Berkeley campus grounds, which, to begin with, was not on my itinerary. When armed with my camera, I can’t help but capture the moment. I also happen to love capturing the moment up close. I love checking out detail that others may miss. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy looking at UC Berkeley, up close.

Berkeley Law

Flower blossoms

Mosaic on water fountain

Sundial

Patterns on the sundial base

Flower

Clock tower – looking up from the ground

Profile of the front of the library

Campus art near one of the main campus entry points

So there’s my trip to Berkeley. I realized while putting this post together, that I really didn’t talk about the conference I attended while in Berkeley. It was the Global Internship Conference. I learned a lot about international internships and how other countries view the “internship” opportunity. Overall, it was nice to attend a conference that was bit on the smaller side. I absolutely love attending the annual ACPA Convention, but it can get to be a little overwhelming with all the people and session options. It was great to reunite with my friend/former co-worker Laura. For the next year or so, I’m guessing that my travel for work will be regulated to Minnesota. I was sent to on two major trips this past year (well, really in the last 4 months), so I figure I shouldn’t ask for too much travel money for awhile. Fear not though, I plan to keep traveling, just for vacation! Once you’ve been bitten by the travel bug, it doesn’t go away. 🙂

Other Berkeley Posts

• Campus Photo Walk: UC Berkeley
• Berkeley Trip From the Phone