Myre-Big Island State Park

MyreBig Island State Park

(Albert Lea, MN)

On the way to Myre–Big Island State Park along some road in southern Minnesota.

I have been to Albert Lea a lot in my life – when I was a kid there there were lots of sports tourney's where we spent the weekend.  In college I occasionally drove by on the way to Luther, but I never knew that this jewel existed pretty much right in town.

There was something really neat about this park geocache program.  There are actually two sets of coordinates at the first location: one if you are going by land and one if you are going by boat.  We programmed in the land route, but what a neat idea – it makes me want to return with a boat (or canoe or kayak).

It was a ways to the next location, so we looked at the map and decided on a game plan to get a bit closer.  This park is pretty big, and it had great and frequent signage – that always makes life and goecaching much easier.

Marcus was wide awake and ready to roll (after his long nap), but decided he wanted to ride for a while.

 This park is really pretty – with some small rolling hills and lots of green.  We saw quite a few hikers and bikers out there.

What you don't see are the tatter tots Marcus was dropping on the ground to leave a trail back to the car...

A view of Lake Albert Lea.

It was a beautiful walk on a beautiful June day – doesn't get much more perfect than this.  It didn't take long for us to find location #2.

Then we were off again – another 0.4 miles to our next stop.

Many trails in this state park, including very busy paved bike trails that connect.

As I said before there were a lot of map signs – why not use them to post the next set of coordinates.

 At this point Marcus was still enjoying the ride – it was pretty warm, so we kept him hydrated!

We were close and the cache was only 0.2 miles away at this point.

We made it to the final cache and it was quite cute – they concealed it in a birdhouse.  Not the first time we have seen this, but the picture on the front of the birdhouse is a nice touch.

Great view of Lake Albert Lea.

We had our first actual card crisis – when we got to the cache there were NO CARDS LEFT!!!!  So we quickly devised a plan – it was about 5:15 pm, so Luke was going to head back ahead of us to make it to the ranger station to get us a card... Marcus and I stayed and signed the log book and put everything away.  Luke ran off towards the office, and I started walking SLOWLY back with Marcus.  At this point he no longer wanted to be carried or to go in the stroller, so we walked!

Luke was able to save the day and get the card after lots and lots of running—Yeah!

The ranger didn't think this was the most photogenic bird for their state park (she wanted the indigo bunting, which is very beautiful bird)...

An interesting bird indeed.