Franz Jevne State Park – The Conclusion

—Franz Jevne State Park—

(Birchdale, MN)

(Minnesota's smallest state park on the Rainy River)

... Part Two...

After leaving Zippel Bay State Park, it was time to head out on the long journey home, but we still had a few stops to make along the way.  About 15 miles down the road is Baudette, MN, the "Walleye Capital of the World" (or at least that's what they call themselves).

Willie the Walleye (40-feet long).
Maybe they really are the Walley Capital of the World...

This town is also directly across the Rainy River (and therefore the border) from Canada and the small town of Rainy River, Canada.  Earlier in the summer, we got within 15 miles of the Canadian border (when were at Lake Bronson State Park) but did not cross over, but we promised Marcus we would bring him over the border at some point this summer, and this was our chance.

The way this crossing works is that the border is actually on each side of the river.  When you cross over you are in a new country and are then met by the border and customs agents for that country...

The bridge and the view was really pretty.

   

When  we got across the border, we met with the friendly Canadian border agent who asked all of the normal questions: "Why are you here?" "To bring our toddler across the border."  "When are you leaving?" "Very soon." "Do you have anything you shouldn't?"  "No."  ... I bet this is a pretty boring job.

It didn't take long (actually even shorter than when we crossed into Canada the day before to go to the Angle – our guess was that because they already had run our background checks the previous day we were already "in their current system") and we were off.

Marcus was vising his first foreign nation (although I am not sure that Canada should really count as a foreign country visit... at least not when you can hardly tell you've left Minnesota and the language is the same there.  On an interesting side note... before Marcus was born we were in Germany and in the middle of the summer after getting off the plane and immediately jumping onto a train and going to Austria, then having to get off the train because the rails ahead were closed, we were left standing on a train platform in southern Germany trying to figure out how to keep going to our hotel in Salzburg.  But everywhere you looked and every person that you saw seemed just like Minnesota... very weird and not at all what you would expect.  The people all looked and behaved just like a typical Minnesotan (think MN State Fair).  There were cornfields everywhere; the landscape was identical.  Other than the fact that the language was German and it was the metric system, it was like we were in Minnesota.  Anyway...)

Grandma and Grandpa Z. were in the car right behind us.

Welcome to the major metropolis of Rainy River, Ontario, Canada.

Since we didn't really have a plan (and had no idea what was in Rainy River, Ontario), we decided to just drive into town – maybe find a park or something and then turn around.  We really thought we were going to have a really quick stop.  But we totally hit the jackpot and found something amazing instead!  A real-life train to check out!

Saying that Marcus was ecstatic is not overkill.  This actually may have been the highlight of the entire trip for him.

Posing with Grandma and Grandpa Z.

He climbed all over the train.  My favorite part was checking out the caboose and seeing what it looked like inside.  I know we have been to the Duluth Train Depot before (very cool), but this seemed even cooler to me.  I just wish it would have been open and we could have went inside.  This was an AWESOME stop!

Big boys like the train too!

 

 I think we were only in Canada for about 60 minutes, but it still counts as Marcus's first international trip. We quickly headed back across the board into Minnesota since we had to get back home this same day.

On a funny note we decided not to tell the boarder patrol about the sketchy-looking, minivan-driving couple that we saw in Canada... wonder what would have happened to Grandma and Grandpa Z. if we had—maybe they would have been strip searched... in hindsight maybe we should have!

Our next step was to head home to the Twin Cities via Luke's parents where Sandy was staying this weekend... Luke and I disagreed over the road to take back.  He normally prefers the road not taken to see more of the actual area we are in, while I am more of a jump-on-the-freeway-and-get-there girl.  Both of these have their advantages, but this time we took Luke's route back.  A good thing as it turned out... it actually ended up bringing us right past the turn off of Highway 11 to Franz Jevne State Park.  The road sign came up and Vonnie asked if we should just take one more stab at getting this state parks' geocache since it was literally right off the road.  (If we didn't and tried doing the biome the next weekend, we probably wouldn't have the bird card needed for it from Franz Jevne and with the missing park ranger at Zippel Bay State Park and Franz Jevne State Park there was no guarantee we could even have them mail us one!)

We had left Rainy River Canada at noon, and in the 25 minutes it took us to get to Franz Jevne, Marcus was hardcore sleeping (and he would be for the next few hours – serious naptime).  So we had a new game plan.  We actually had the coordinates in for the final location from our first visit to Franz Jevne (actually all three set of coordinates), and here was the plan.  Luke headed down to look EVERYWHERE to find the cache while I waited in the car with sleeping Marcus.  This meant bringing the waterproof Merrells to climb along the mucky river shoreline and running the whole way downhill and down the path to get to the general area where the coordinates brought us last time.

Here are a pictures of his search area.  He looked everywhere.  And quickly, too, since we couldn't afford to lose time with so much driving to get Sandy and get home today.

Talk about speed geocaching.  He was everywhere.

Eventually he found it—and it wasn't even close to any of the coordinates that we had seen.  It was back in the woods behind a grill/picnic table area at the bottom of a tree.  Not even close to where the coordinates were!!  Almost makes us wonder if it was moved.  It was on the opposite side of the path and way back in the woods.  It was probably over 80 feet from the given coordinates.  This was one of the worst geocaches we saw in the Avian Geocache program (and after reading the logs, we are not alone in that opinion).  Definitely the worst set of coordinates, bar none.

 

Well we made the goal and found the geocache, amazingly!  Luke ran back to the car out of breath, and next I went down so I could find it as well while Luke sat in the car with Marcus and went through his poison ivy "decontamination" (we keep a 2-gallon camping water jug (with spigot) and some Fels Naptha soap in a Rubbermaid container in the trunk on these trips, so we can scrub down and switch out of long-sleeved shirts and sweats whenever going into the bush where there is even a remote chance of poison ivy – kind of a pain, but after last summer we don't any chances this year in all the state parks we were going to!  Believe us, this stuff is bad news.).

After completing this trip, we are getting really close to finishing the entire Avian Adventure challenge—just one big trip back north next weekend and one final trip to Itasca and we will have made the goal.  Here is the updated map showing where we have been and everything that is left to see!                  Just in case you can't tell, we have 7 parks/recreation areas with 8 geocaches left to go.

The bird card for Franz Jevne is the Spotted Sandpiper.  It was a lot of work to get this one, and it was pretty miraculous that going the way back we did and on a whim and under time constraints, we managed to pull this one of at all!  On the way out of the park, my parents were driving in to do this geocache, so we gave them the correct coordinates for the final geocache so my dad would have not have all the trouble we did trying to find it.