I visited friends in St. Cloud, Minnesota in August.  Before coming here I spent three days in Chicago and wore myself out walking. I was to come here by train, but because floods had washed out sections of the track in Wisconsin, Amtrak sent us on from Chicago to Minneapolis by bus. What should have been an 8-hour trip by train took me nearly 13 hours. I enjoyed my visit in St. Cloud, but I didn't spend too much time with photography.

The Munsinger Clemens Botanical Society in St. Cloud is actually two gardens. This is the Munsinger Garden, an informal one with flower-bordered paths under tall pine trees, constructed by the WPA in the 1930s

On a sunny hill above the other garden is Clemens Garden, with five formal gardens. This is the Treillage Garden. The Three Graces Fountain is under the dome.

Even though Minnesota doesn't have as many farms and farmers as it once did, the Minnesota State Fair is one of the country's bigger ones. We spent four or five hours there and couldn't see half of it.  A montage of fair food on a stick. I had a Pronto Pup, a hot dog covered with corn batter, deep fried, and slathered with mustard on one side and catsup on the other. The batter next to the hot dog was steamed and a little gummy. i don't need to eat another. Almost anything that could be impaled on a stick and survive deep frying was fair game. How about a battered Milky Way candy bar on a stick? Deep fried cheese curd was another popular item.

I wanted to go to the Mall of America, perhaps the top Minnesota tourist attraction. MOA is a rectangular mall with anchor stores at each corner, and between them have four miles of corridors with about 500 stores. With a few local exceptions, these are the same stores you see in your mall at home. The center court makes the mall unique because it has a full-fledged amusement park with three roller coasters, a log flume ride, and ferris wheel.