Travel Tuesday: Northern Minnesota Trip, Part Two

Happy Tuesday everyone! For today's Travel Tuesday post, I'm continuing to share about our recent trip to Northern Minnesota. If you missed part one, you can find it here!

Tuesday, July 27th, our plan was to travel near the city of Brainerd to go to Paul Bunyan Land. It was about an hour's drive from the cabin we were staying at, so we ate breakfast, packed up a lunch, and headed out.

Of course, on our way there, we started having car trouble- the radio would turn off and the heat defrost would turn on full blast! For a high-80's day, this was definitely not welcome. We called a couple of Ford dealerships in the area (we have a Ford Flex), but of course they were booked weeks out and couldn't squeeze us in. After a lot of Googling, we decided to try to reset the SYNC system back to factory settings and thankfully that seemed to do the trick! We were VERY thankful we didn't have to deal with no A/C the rest of the trip!

Anyway, we made it to Paul Bunyan Land in one piece.

Paul Bunyan Land is basically an amusement park that has actually been open since 1950! Since 2003 in it's current location. The park's trademark is a 26-foot-tall statue of Paul Bunyan that actually moves and talks! He greets all children by name as they enter the park :) We went to their old location a few times when I was growing up, and my dad also went when he was a kid too! Kind of cool that 3 generations in our family now have seen this place as kids!

Inside the park, there are around 30 rides and attractions. Most of them are carnival-type rides for younger children, which my son absolutely loved!   

I took a hard pass on the ferris wheel! I am not the biggest fan of heights and it was way too out in the open for me. My son went with my brother and brother-in-law instead.

We all went on the train ride, though :)

I did go on the roller coaster with my son- it looked pretty tame, but it was surprisingly intense! I caught some air each time we went around a turn!

We took a break from the heat and had a picnic in the car :)

They also have a petting barn and an old-timey Pioneer Village, which was a bunch of buildings set up in turn-of-the century style as well as large buildings full of antiques. It's sad when you find toys you played with as a child in antique stores 😂

Has anyone seen this movie? They were playing it on full-blast inside this building 😂

We ended the day with dinner at Zorbaz (a Mexican and Pizza restaurant) and more fishing and boat rides. My hubby and brother-in-law went fishing in the evenings most nights, so I would get the kids ready for bed while watching the Olympics in our bedroom.

My son has a "lazy" eye, so he has to wear this eye patch about an hour a day to try and strengthen the eye muscles.

The following day, Wednesday the 28th, was another chill day at the cabin- fishing, boat rides, naps, etc. Since most things we wanted to do were at least an hour drive from the cabin, we liked having rest days in-between our "excursion" days.

Haha she always had this serious face when we'd go on boat rides! But I promise she had a great time!

On this trip, each family took a night to make dinner for everyone, which made planning a lot easier. We made dinner on this evening, of which we made tin foil dinners. I actually blogged this about 8 years ago! Basically, each person could construct their own meal; I had several items you could add- potatoes, brats, chicken sausages, lots of different veggies and spices. I cooked them in the oven instead of over a fire (there were burn warnings the week we were up there), and it made for easy clean-up too!

That is a wrap on part two of our Minnesota trip! I will post the final part to our trip hopefully next week, although I'm not making any promises ;) So make sure you're subscribed to the blog so you can get a notification when it does go live! 

On another note, would anyone be interested in a throw-back look at our 2018 Disneyland trip? I've been thinking of sharing it as another memory-keeping record of our trip and in preparation for our upcoming Disney World trip! Let me know!