My Minnesota - Rochester

I'm joining up again with my fellow Minnesotans to highlight places we've explored in our state this past month. Be sure to click the link at the bottom of the post to follow the circle around.

As suspected, the warmer weather had us exploring all sorts of things in June. We went to multiple local city festivals, and a new (to us) library, but our big adventure was going to Rochester, MN for a day. We went to visit my brother who just had surgery so I suggested to my husband that we find a place to hike while we were there.... move our legs a bit after a long drive. "What's in Rochester", my husband asked with a tone of disbelief that we could find anything remotely interesting there. He loves the North Shore so it's a little hard to convince him that there are other awesome places within Minnesota, especially south of us. I took his comment as a bit of a challenge and found Quarry Hill Nature Center to explore.

Besides having a nature center where you can see various animals (fish, turtles. birds, bees, etc), they have quite a number of trails. They have them nicely broken up into various types of trails so you can determine which is best for you. We were mostly on the family trails, but also found ourselves wandering through other trails such as the stream trail, and the savanna trail. If we lived closer, we'd totally take advantage of the programs they have such as the cave tour and the kid's classes. While we were there, we saw kid's from one of their programs feed minnows to the big fish.

As the name suggests, the Quarry Hill Nature Center used to be a quarry, but it also belonged to the state hospital. They had a farm there, and used local caves to store the vegetables they grew. Apparently, one of the patients, who was a poet, led one of the cave crews and his poems can be found carved into the cave walls.

In the end, my husband totally owned up to how much he loved Rochester and this park. He even joked that he could be convinced to move there. I'm not quite ready to move, but I do look forward to the next time we can visit this place. 

And that is how we explored Minnesota during the month of June. Make sure to check out where Erin from Hello Photo explored this month and follow the circle around.