Flandrau State Park

Flandrau State Park (New Ulm, MN)

Our last park of the day was Flandrau State Park in New Ulm, MN.  This is a cute park with a really neat sand bottom pool (clearly not open yet for the season).  It is right at the edge of town and feels like it is actually a city park (kind of like Charles A. Lindbergh State Park by Little Falls, MN, as Luke pointed out).  We got to the park around 5 pm, and the weather was starting to look a bit ominous.  The park office was once again closed – this gets annoying because there are no baby-changing stations in outhouses!

We quickly parked and started searching for our first location.  It was actually very easy to find!

So we quickly went off to Location #2 –  Marcus thought it would be a bit more fun to wonder around the volleyball court (he has seen us playing volleyball before).  By the 4th stop of the day he usually is getting pretty feisty and a bit crabby, so we let him do some running!

It didn't take long to find Location #2.

Here is the view of the Cottonwood River from the bench.

At this point Luke and Marcus went wondering around the park while I went in search of the next location.  I got to admit – I saw this stump from a long ways away, and I knew it was there!

It was the perfect size for a geocache ammo box!

While I searched, Luke and Marcus walked all over the dry swimming pool bed.  Marcus LOVED the sand and running up and down!  He even climbed up both lifeguard chairs with Luke, which he really enjoyed.

And since we were in New Ulm we took a quick drive over to see Herman the German (Arminius who kept the Romans out of Germany for good is who Herman is actually portraying) on his perch before we had to leave!  Too bad the gate was locked so we couldn't go to the top.  We also missed the last glockenspiel performance of the day by half an hour.  New Ulm is a very neat town, and we really want to go back to spend more time there.