Jason and I will make a drive if the destination involves good baked goods, excellent coffee, and a welcoming spot to hang out. The Basic Place in Hammond, Minnesota has all of these things and more.
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The Parlour at The Charmant Hotel
La Crosse, WI Winter Weekend Getaway
One goal for 2022, especially after two years of the pandemic keeping us close to home, is to travel more. First up: La Crosse, WI. I took the recommendation of my driftless sister Courtney and booked a night at the Charmant Hotel. We almost exclusively stay at Airbnbs these days, so being in a hotel felt like a true luxury. Also, La Crosse is just a two-hour drive from Northfield, so it felt like enough of a getaway, but still doable for a weekend. The Charmant is a 67-room boutique hotel in downtown La Crosse, and housed in a former chocolate factory (so of course you get fancy chocolate upon check-in). It is right off the Mississippi River, and even in the negative temps of January, there were still runners jogging along it.
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A Winter Repreive: Wild Rice Retreat Center
As a child, I used my allowance to buy my first architecture book: Thomas Fisher’s profile of Duluth-based architect, David Salmela. I had forgotten about it until a few years ago when I went to a panel of women in real estate at The Coven in Minneapolis. There, one of the women talked about a new development she was working on near Bayfield, Wisconsin. A retreat called Wild Rice Retreat Center, perched on the shore of Lake Superior near the Apostle Island National Lakeshore. She was partnering with Salmela as the architect, who had designed the original restaurant on the site years ago. Since then, I’ve been biding my time, waiting to see what it is actually like inside one of his spaces.
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Whitetail Woods Camper Cabins for the NYE Win
We were lucky enough to snag one of Whitetail Woods’ new Prairie View camper cabins to ring in 2022. If you can get one, these camper cabins are one of my favorite winter camping options in Minnesota. They are the perfect distance from home, heated, cozy, well-designed, and peaceful.
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Lamb Sacrifice at Spring Wind Farm
A perfect combination of factors made this photoshoot one of my favorites of the year. My husband is in a band with a Classics professor at Carleton College, Jake Morton. Jake studies ancient animal slaughter and sacrifice through a very experiential lens: he recreates the process and rituals and documents what he observes. Since animal sacrifice practices were a very communal event, he invited a circle of folks to join him at Spring Wind Farm, including professors in adjacent disciplines (hey, liberal arts!), his students, farmers, and friends.
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Lake Belle Taine
Thanks 100% to my sister-in-law — the only one in our family capable of planning more than 48 hours in advance — we took our second family vacation up to Lake Belle Taine in northern Minnesota. We immediately fell into the same routine as last year: beer and seltzers in the coolers on the porch, taking turns cooking for each other, sweet corn at nearly every meal, hours-long pontoon rides in the afternoon, bonfire, cards, bed.
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Big Pine Lake
In the midst of yet another sweltering summer, we took my good friend Melissa up on a generous offer to gather at her family’s cabin on Big Pine Lake. We mostly ate and talked, but we did cruise around and comment on the increasingly large homes replacing the hand-built cabins of ancestors. It was a much-needed retreat.
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Visitor center at Franconia Sculpture Park
Franconia Sculpture Park
Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, Minnesota is a great spot for a COVID-friendly stroll if you, like me, desperately need to leave your home.
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The remaining geese in Lyman Lakes who, like the rest of us, thought winter wasn’t coming.
Christmas Blizzard
Just when we thought it was going to be both a lonely + brown Christmas, a blizzard came and made it seem logical we were sitting alone at home for the holidays.
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COVID Time Capsule
For my own posterity, I wanted to track how the exponential curve toward a new understanding of reality took shape in my mind during the beginning of COVID. Our ability as a species to reach a place of equilibrium, to “normalize” almost any state that continues for longer than a couple of weeks, is also fascinating (even if biologically sensible). I want to slow down my memory, notice better, try to learn some things from this once in a lifetime (fingers crossed) global pandemic.
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