Minnesota

Land of 10,000 Lakes -- and a beautiful river.

Thank you, Jeremy, for the recommendation to visit Lake Itasca, where the Mississippi River begins its flow.

And the Mississippi's mighty

But it starts in Minnesota

At a place that you could walk across

With five steps down...

Hmmm, so where does a river actually begin? The concept first came to me when I heard those words in a favorite Indigo Girls tune, "Ghost." Listen here and read the lyrics if you'd like.

So after not speaking for nearly 2 hours because someone was cranky that we couldn't find a campground, northern Minnesota greeted us with a rainbow. A better omen...?

We've arrived. The rocks in the foreground indicate the headwaters of the Mississippi River (Cranky Man took this photo; he might be feeling better).

Rivers might be my favorite waterway...

Lake Itasca is peaceful and unpopulated at sunset...

...save for Loren Ingebretsen, who has just caught a big one. You might have spotted Loren in the picture above (also taken by Cranky Man).

This will either go really well or really badly. Judy takes her chances and crosses over the Mississippi to where Loren is fishing (unaware that Cranky Man is photographing her).

She is greeted by a big smile and an uncranky man (!) who shows her the fish he's just caught and is quick to tell her that he loves fishing here so much because his great grandaddy came to this part of Minnesota back in the 1800s as a homesteader. Judy's hooked!

He keeps his reel in the water and asks Judy if she'd like to hear a story.

JUDY: Well, sure.

LOREN: One of my own or a story written by someone else?

JUDY: I'd love to hear yours.

LOREN: Well okay then. It was 6:30 a.m. on a 4th of July morning...

Click here if you'd like to listen along...

There's also a real cool feature the National Park Service offers where you can have people watch you there on a webcam. Lizzie sent us this picture of Mark, disinterested and a grateful distance away from Judy who is talking to Loren.

The night is lovely. But still no place to stay.

Judy frets. Loren suggests a nearby campground. It seems perfect.

The office is closed when we arrive. It is country-dark outside. (Okay I'll stop telling the story as if I'm Loren.) They've posted a note for late-arriving campers to just choose an empty spot and square up in the morning. We set up to cook dinner in the dark -- an unwelcome challenge for two people who still aren't talking -- and suddenly we both realize the mosquitos have swarmed us. Still not speaking, we jump around grabbing food, bug spray, plates, and jam it all into the front seats of the van.

We slam the doors shut and stare straight ahead with all this crap in our hands.

Then Mark slowly crawls into the back of the van for a bottle of red wine (Thank you Rotter-Coopersmiths!) and a cork screw. In our hermetically sealed van, we spend the next hour in the driver and passenger seats eating something like dinner and drinking the wine out of the bottle like we're in middle school.

By the morning we were speaking again. On to Wisconsin!