From the Midwest's only UNESCO World Heritage Site to a Wisconsin town that still looks like it was lifted from 1830s Cornwall, here is the honest guide most travel sites won't write.
The American heartland holds more surprises than any road atlas suggests.
The Midwest gets an unfair reputation as flyover country, a land you tolerate between coasts. That reputation is partly earned by the people writing about it, who tend to cover Chicago, note that the cornfields are "vast," and call it a region. The twelve states running from Ohio to the Dakotas contain something more interesting: a genuine accumulation of immigration history, geological freakery, lake country that rivals Scandinavia, and towns that have been quietly doing their thing without asking for attention. This guide is an attempt to do those places justice.
Major 2026 Events Hitting the Midwest
Galena
Jo Daviess County, Illinois
Main Street Galena preserves more 19th-century commercial architecture per block than almost any other town in Illinois.
Galena is the kind of place that makes you interrogate your own assumptions about the Midwest. Ninety percent of its pre-Civil War buildings are still standing, a circumstance explained by a quirk of geology: the town's lead mining boom ended before the railroad era, which meant no economic pressure to tear anything down and rebuild. The result is a downtown that feels genuinely preserved rather than reconstructed for tourism.
Main Street alone runs past Federal-style storefronts, cast-iron-fronted commercial buildings, and Italianate town houses that date to the 1840s and 1850s. The Ulysses S. Grant Home, donated to the general by grateful Galena citizens in 1865, sits on a bluff above town in pristine condition. Grant returned here after his presidency and died in New York, but the house remained intact and became a state historic site. The docents here know their material cold.
What most guides underreport: Galena sits inside Jo Daviess County, which is technically part of the Driftless Area, a glacially unscoured landscape of steep ridges and narrow valleys that looks more like the Ozarks than what people picture when they imagine Illinois. The Eagle Ridge Resort area offers horseback riding, mountain biking, and some of the best fly-fishing access in the state along the Galena River. In October, the bluffs turn amber and rust, and the weekend crowd thins considerably compared to summer.
The Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, which once made this region economically vital, ran its first locomotive in 1848 and was actually the first railroad chartered in Illinois. The depot still stands at the edge of town and is rarely visited despite being free to enter.
For accommodation, the DeSoto House Hotel on Main Street opened in 1855 and hosted presidents Lincoln and Grant; rooms facing the street give you a view of the gas-lamp streetscape that hasn't fundamentally changed in a century. If you want solitude, the farmhouses and barns converted to B&Bs in the surrounding hills will serve better.
Decorah
Winneshiek County, Iowa
Decorah is tucked into a bend of the Upper Iowa River in the Driftless Area of northeast Iowa, and the surrounding landscape of exposed limestone bluffs and spring-fed trout streams is genuinely unusual for a state associated primarily with flat farmland. Norwegian settlers arrived here in the 1850s, and their presence is still palpable in ways that go beyond the decorative.
The Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum holds the largest collection of Norwegian-American material culture in the world, more than 24,000 objects spread across twelve buildings, including a complete mid-19th century farmstead moved stone by stone from Norway. The collection includes Viking-age replica vessels, rosemaling paintings, and everyday objects from immigrant kitchens and workshops that tell the story of the crossing from Norway with more precision than any textbook manages.
The birdwatching here has a devoted international following. The bluffs along the Upper Iowa River create a natural migration funnel, and the bald eagle population is so dense in winter that wildlife photographer visits are booked months in advance. Dunning's Spring Park, a short walk from downtown, has a waterfall that freezes into blue-green formations each January, a sight virtually unknown outside the region.
Decorah's Toppling Goliath Brewing Company has been consistently ranked among the top small breweries in the United States. Their King Sue double IPA and Mornin' Delight imperial stout have genuine cult followings. The taproom is worth the trip on its own.
The annual Nordic Fest happens the last full weekend of July and involves three days of hardanger fiddle music, folk dancing, open-air cooking demonstrations, and a parade that draws around 12,000 people to a town of fewer than 8,000. It is genuinely participatory rather than theatrical.
Nashville
Brown County, Indiana
Brown County is widely called the "Little Smokies of the Midwest," a comparison that undersells it. The wooded hills around Nashville, Indiana attracted plein air painters in the early 1900s who found the autumn light here exceptional, and the tradition has continued uninterrupted. Today the town hosts over 100 working artists and galleries within a half-mile radius. The Brown County Art Gallery, founded in 1926, holds permanent works by the original colony painters.
Brown County State Park, the largest state park in Indiana at 16,000 acres, surrounds the town on three sides. Its 75 miles of trails include horse paths, technical mountain bike loops, and a network of accessible ridge walks. The state park lodge, a log-and-stone structure built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, still operates and offers rooms with views across the forested valley. Booking in October requires six months of advance notice.
The Story Inn, located in the tiny unincorporated community of Story about 8 miles south of Nashville, occupies a general store built in 1851. It has a James Beard-recognized restaurant and four rooms, and it is the kind of place that changes how people think about rural Indiana dining. Go for the walleye if it is on the menu.
What the fall crowds miss: Nashville in late May and early June is quiet, green, and cool. The wildflowers in the state park are at their peak, accommodation rates drop by 40 percent compared to October, and the galleries are unhurried. The mountain bike trails are at their best before summer heat sets in.
Stillwater
Washington County, Minnesota
Stillwater is called the birthplace of Minnesota because the territorial convention that led to Minnesota statehood met here in 1848, a fact marked by a plaque most visitors walk past without stopping. The more immediately compelling history is the town's run as a major lumber processing center in the late 1800s, when logs floated down the St. Croix River were sorted, cut, and shipped across the country. The Victorian-era commercial buildings along Main Street are a direct product of that timber wealth.
The St. Croix River here is designated a National Wild and Scenic River, a federal designation that has prevented significant development along both banks and kept the water corridor in a state that feels genuinely wild for a river 30 minutes from a major metropolitan area. The Stillwater Lift Bridge, a 1931 vertical-lift bridge that now carries pedestrians only, is one of the most photographed structures in Minnesota.
For book people: Stillwater has a concentration of antiquarian and used bookshops that is disproportionate to its size. The lowell inn bookshop and several independent dealers stock regional history, first editions, and out-of-print midwestern Americana. The town hosts a book festival in July that draws collectors from across the Upper Midwest.
Paddleboat tours on the St. Croix run from May through October and can be booked for two-hour evening cruises that coincide with sunset. The river widens into Lake St. Croix at this point, creating conditions for some of the better sunsets in the Twin Cities region.
Bayfield
Bayfield County, Wisconsin
Bayfield is one of the smallest incorporated towns in the United States and one of the most dramatically situated, perched on a hillside above Lake Superior with the 21 islands of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore spread across the water in front of it. The lakeshore is a federally managed wilderness with no permanent residents, accessible only by boat or, in deep winter, on foot across the ice.
The sea caves carved into the sandstone cliffs of the mainland unit of the national lakeshore are accessible by kayak from mid-June through late September. Guided kayak tours depart from Bayfield and take four to six hours round trip. The caves themselves are 30 to 60 feet high, with narrow passages that force single-file paddling and open into chambers where the lake glows turquoise from refracted light.
In winter, when Lake Superior freezes sufficiently, an ice road forms to Madeline Island and the sea caves become accessible on foot. Ice formations up to 40 feet tall develop along the cave walls in January and February, drawing photographers who camp on the ice overnight. The National Park Service monitors ice conditions daily; the caves are only accessible on average 2 to 3 years out of 5.
The hillside orchards north of Bayfield produce apples, cherries, and strawberries in conditions that seem impossible given Wisconsin's latitude, because Lake Superior moderates temperatures enough to extend the growing season. The Bayfield Apple Festival, held the first full weekend of October, is the single largest event in Bayfield County, drawing around 50,000 people to a town of 460 permanent residents.
Hermann
Gasconade County, Missouri
Hermann was founded in 1836 by the German Settlement Society of Philadelphia, a group of German Americans who wanted to create a community that would preserve German language and culture in the new world. The bluffs above the Missouri River reminded the founders enough of the Rhine Valley that they named the new town after the Germanic hero Arminius, who defeated the Roman legions at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. The wine culture followed naturally: German immigrants planted the hillside vineyards beginning in the 1840s, and Missouri was producing more wine than any other state in the union by 1904.
Stone Hill Winery, founded in 1847, was the second largest winery in the world before Prohibition. When alcohol production became legal again, the family-owned operation resumed and now produces around 250,000 gallons annually from grapes grown on the original hillside. Tours of the underground cellars, which run 200 feet into the bluff, are the most substantive winery tour experience in the Midwest.
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The Missouri River valley near Hermann looks, in the right light, plausibly Rhenish.
The Historic Hermann Museum occupies a four-story brick building downtown and documents the German immigration experience with a level of care that puts larger metropolitan museums to shame. The collection includes original 1840s furniture, German-language newspapers from the 1850s, and a room dedicated to the town's winegrowing heritage.
Hermann's Wharf Street runs along the Missouri River floodplain and feels genuinely apart from the more touristic Main Street. Several old commercial buildings here have been converted to studios by painters and potters who moved here from St. Louis in the 1990s and never left. The Saturday morning market here from May through October draws local growers, not resellers.
Saugatuck
Allegan County, Michigan
Saugatuck sits at the point where the Kalamazoo River meets Lake Michigan, and the geography creates a pocket of land between river and lake that can only be reached from town by the SS Keewatin hand-cranked chain ferry, one of the last hand-operated ferries of its kind in the United States. The ferry carries up to six cars and takes about three minutes to cross; the crossing is something people remember years after the visit.
The town developed an arts colony in the 1910s when Ox-Bow School of Art was established on the south side of the Kalamazoo River, offering summer workshops. Ox-Bow is affiliated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and still runs faculty-led workshops each summer; the campus of studio buildings and residences is architecturally interesting in its own right.
Mount Baldhead is a 200-foot sand dune directly above town, accessed by 302 wooden steps and requiring about 15 minutes of genuine effort to climb. The view from the top takes in the Kalamazoo River, Lake Michigan, and the town simultaneously. It is free, virtually unknown to first-time visitors, and one of the better viewpoints in the entire Lower Peninsula.
Saugatuck Dunes State Park, two miles north of town, protects 2.5 miles of undeveloped Lake Michigan shoreline. The park sees a fraction of the traffic of Holland State Park or Warren Dunes, and on a Tuesday in June you can walk a quarter mile of sand in either direction and not see another person.
Traverse City
Grand Traverse County, Michigan
Traverse City produces 40 percent of all tart cherries grown in the United States, a statistic that seems implausible until you drive the Old Mission Peninsula north of town and find yourself surrounded by 25 miles of cherry orchards on a narrow strip of land between two arms of Grand Traverse Bay. The same moderating effect of the Great Lakes that makes Bayfield's orchards possible applies here at a much larger scale.
The Leelanau Peninsula wine trail west of town contains around 25 wineries within a 40-minute drive, most of them specializing in cold-climate varietals including Pinot Noir, Riesling, and Pinot Gris that have been winning national recognition since the early 2000s. The peninsula's soil composition and microclimate are genuinely unique, and the wines don't taste like anything produced elsewhere in the Midwest.
The Traverse City Film Festival, founded by filmmaker Michael Moore, runs annually in late July and screens around 100 films across five downtown venues. The festival has a reputation for genuine curatorial quality rather than the celebrity spectacle that dominates larger festivals. Tickets are affordable and frequently available at the door.
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, 30 miles west of Traverse City, includes a dune climb that puts visitors at 460 feet above Lake Michigan. The view down to the lake from the top of the dune is one of the most disorienting things you will experience in the Midwest: the drop is so steep and the water so blue that it looks less like a lake than a fjord.
Pella
Marion County, Iowa
Pella was founded by Dutch Reformed immigrants fleeing religious persecution in 1847, and the founders chose the name from the Hebrew word meaning city of refuge. The settlement intention was genuine and the cultural continuity has been remarkable: Pella still holds Dutch language services at Central Reformed Church, and the Molengracht canal district in the town center was redesigned to replicate a Dutch townscape, complete with a working windmill that is among the tallest in the United States.
The Tulip Time Festival, held during the first week of May when 300,000 bulbs bloom simultaneously, draws around 150,000 visitors. Klompen dancers in traditional dress perform in the Volksparade, and the town smells of street-side stroopwafels and poffertjes. It is genuinely over the top and genuine at the same time, which is a difficult combination to achieve.
Jaarsma Bakery on Franklin Street has been producing Dutch butter cookies, almond pastries, and banket (a Dutch almond-paste pastry) since 1898. The line on Tulip Time weekends runs out the door and down the block; go on a Thursday in September and you'll have the counter to yourself. The Dutch letters are worth any wait.
Lanesboro
Fillmore County, Minnesota
Lanesboro is a town of 720 people that has a nationally recognized professional theater company, an 88-mile limestone-surfaced bike trail, and a surrounding landscape of wooded bluffs and spring creeks that the Driftless Area advocates argue is the most geologically distinct terrain in the Midwest. The Root River Trail follows the Root River corridor through a series of limestone gorges and connects four other towns along a route that takes two days to bike at a leisurely pace and produces almost no elevation gain.
The Commonweal Theatre Company, founded in 1989 and operating in a restored 1889 commercial building, produces four or five productions per season and has a permanent acting company rather than the rotating guest-cast model used by most regional theaters. The quality is consistent in a way that surprises people who expect community theater.
The Amish community around Harmony and Canton, about 20 miles from Lanesboro, is one of the larger Old Order communities in Minnesota. Driving these county roads on a clear morning and encountering a horse-drawn buggy silhouetted against the bluffs creates a visual experience that has nothing to do with tourism theater. Amish farms sell baked goods, furniture, and produce from roadside stands; pay in cash and do not photograph people.
Eight Places the Other Guides Skip
These destinations appear on almost no mainstream travel itinerary. Each one is worth driving past a better-known attraction to reach.
Mineral Point
Iowa County, Wisconsin
Mineral Point is the third-oldest city in Wisconsin and looks nothing like the rest of the state. In the 1820s, Cornish miners arrived from Cornwall, England to work the lead and zinc deposits in the surrounding hills, and they built their houses from local limestone in the style of the villages they came from. The result is a streetscape, particularly along Shake Rag Street, that looks as though it was transported from the Cornish coast and set down in southwest Wisconsin.
Pendarvis State Historic Site preserves six Cornish stone cottages dating from the 1830s and 1840s. Tours are given by interpreters who discuss both the mining history and the domestic life of immigrant families in astonishing detail. The site is quiet, understaffed, and one of the most historically evocative places in the Midwest. Admission is modest and the parking lot is usually half empty.
Mineral Point has the highest concentration of working artists per capita of any town in Wisconsin. Shake Rag Alley, a historic campus of stone buildings adjacent to the town center, runs arts education programs and hosts a summer artists-in-residence program that draws instructors from across the country. The annual Fall Art Tour opens studios throughout the county, including farms and converted barns that are otherwise private.
Grand Marais
Cook County, Minnesota
Grand Marais sits where the Sawtooth Mountains meet Lake Superior on the North Shore, and the juxtaposition of 1,000-foot ridgelines and an inland sea creates a landscape that feels more like coastal Norway than the American Midwest. The town itself occupies a small harbor protected by a rocky headland, and the Grand Marais Art Colony, founded in 1947, has produced a working arts community that influences everything from the galleries downtown to the aesthetic of the restaurant menus.
Grand Marais is the primary eastern gateway to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a 1.1-million-acre roadless area of interconnected lakes and rivers on the Minnesota-Canada border. More than 1,200 miles of canoe routes are accessible from the Grand Marais area; outfitters in town provide permits, canoe rental, and guided trips for everything from one-night introductory paddles to 14-day wilderness expeditions.
Cook County, where Grand Marais is located, has some of the darkest skies in the lower 48 states due to its distance from any major city and its position above the light-polluting Great Lakes shoreline. Northern lights are visible here on average 20 or more nights per year, particularly in August, September, and January. The harbor breakwater is the local viewing spot of choice.
Cahokia Mounds
St. Clair County, Illinois (near Collinsville)
Cahokia at its height had roughly the same population as London. Today it receives fewer visitors per year than a regional airport. This is the most undervisited UNESCO World Heritage Site in North America.
Cahokia Mounds is the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Midwest and one of the most neglected significant archaeological sites in the world. At its peak between 1050 and 1200 AD, the city covered more than six square miles of the Mississippi River floodplain east of present-day St. Louis and housed an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 people at its center, with an additional 40,000 to 50,000 in the surrounding region. This was roughly the population of London at the same period in history.
Monks Mound, the central structure, is the largest earthen pyramid in North America, rising 100 feet and covering 14 acres at its base, larger at the base than the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was built in stages between 900 and 1200 AD, entirely by human labor without the use of wheels or draft animals. The scale only becomes comprehensible when you stand at the top and look out across the remaining 65 of the original 120 mounds.
The interpretive center is excellent, with dioramas, excavation artifacts, and a detailed account of archaeological research conducted since the late 19th century. Scientists studying fossilized teeth have traced the immigration patterns of Cahokia's population to origins as distant as the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes. The city's sudden abandonment around 1350 AD remains unexplained, though climate shifts and resource depletion are the leading hypotheses.
Cahokia was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966 and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982, yet it draws fewer than 300,000 visitors annually. For comparison, Stonehenge draws over 1.5 million. Admission to the site is free; the interpretive center charges a small fee. Allow three hours minimum, four if you plan to walk to the outlying mounds. The site is 8 miles from the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and can be combined in a single day.
Frankenmuth
Saginaw County, Michigan
Frankenmuth was settled by Bavarian Lutheran missionaries in 1845 and has maintained its German character with an enthusiasm that crosses into genuine commitment. The half-timbered architecture along Main Street is not a recent historical reinvention but a continuous tradition, and the Bavarian Inn and Zehnder's restaurants have been serving the same family-style chicken dinner recipes since the 1940s. Zehnder's serves approximately one million dinners per year and employs around 600 people, making it one of the most successful single restaurants in the United States by volume.
Bronner's Christmas Wonderland, a 320,000-square-foot retail store, stocks over 50,000 Christmas ornaments and decorations year-round and draws 2 million visitors annually. The Holz Brucke covered bridge over the Cass River is the longest covered pedestrian bridge in Michigan and provides the most photographed view in town.
What most visitors miss: the St. Lorenz Church, built in 1880 in Romanesque Revival style, is one of the most architecturally significant churches in Michigan. The congregation still conducts regular services and the interior, with its vaulted ceiling and stained glass, is accessible to visitors outside service hours. The church archives hold original correspondence from the 1845 mission, which is available for scholarly research by appointment.
Lucas
Russell County, Kansas
Lucas, Kansas is a town of 380 people that has attracted more serious attention from the international folk art world than most major cities. The Garden of Eden, created between 1905 and 1932 by Civil War veteran Samuel Dinsmoor, is a 40-foot-tall, 11-building compound of hand-poured concrete sculptures depicting biblical and political allegories. Dinsmoor mummified himself and requested that his glass-lidded coffin be placed in a concrete mausoleum on the property, which it was. The property is now a museum and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Bowl Plaza, a public restroom decorated floor-to-ceiling with mosaics made from broken pottery and glass, was created by locals and is widely cited in folk art scholarship as an example of community art practice. The Grassroots Art Center documents and displays the work of self-taught artists from across the Great Plains region.
Lucas is also home to the World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Versions of the World's Largest Things, a traveling museum that documents roadside attractions across the country through scale models. The collection arrived from other states but ended up based in Lucas permanently, which says something about how seriously this town takes the art of the absurd.
Marquette
Marquette County, Michigan (Upper Peninsula)
Marquette sits on a natural harbor on the south shore of Lake Superior, and the combination of an active university, a downtown that has survived the economic contraction that gutted many Upper Peninsula cities, and proximity to genuine wilderness creates a quality of life that draws people from Chicago and Detroit who decide to stay. The downtown has a density of independent restaurants, coffee shops, and live music venues that punches well above its weight for a city of 20,000.
The Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, 45 minutes east of Marquette along Lake Superior's shoreline, protects 42 miles of sandstone cliffs that have been sculpted by wave action into caves, arches, and columns in multicolored bands of mineral staining: iron oxide orange, copper green, manganese black. The cliffs are best seen from the water; kayak tours and cruise boats depart from Munising, the small town at the western end of the lakeshore.
Marquette's Upper Harbor has a 19th-century iron ore loading facility, the Marquette Lower Harbor Ore Docks, which are 1,250 feet long and 75 feet tall, made of reinforced concrete. They are no longer operational but stand intact on the waterfront as one of the most photogenic industrial structures in the Upper Midwest. Night photography here is extraordinary.
Door County
Door County, Wisconsin
Door County is Wisconsin's version of Cape Cod, a narrow peninsula extending 75 miles into Lake Michigan with 300 miles of shoreline, 11 lighthouses, and a cherry orchard landscape that blankets the entire middle of the peninsula. The towns of Fish Creek, Ephraim, Sister Bay, and Egg Harbor are interconnected by Highway 42, and driving its length on a September weekday, with the orchards showing the first color change and the summer crowds gone, is one of the genuinely pleasant road experiences available in the Midwest.
The fish boil, a Door County tradition dating to the 19th-century Scandinavian fishing communities, involves cooking whitefish, potatoes, and onions in a large outdoor cauldron over a wood fire, then creating a theatrical fireball by throwing kerosene on the flames to boil the oil off the surface of the water. White Gull Inn in Fish Creek has been serving it since 1896.
Newport State Park at the tip of the peninsula is a certified International Dark Sky Park, one of only a few in the Midwest. The park has 11 miles of trail that can be hiked at night for aurora and Milky Way viewing; the park specifically encourages night hiking. Ranger-led astronomy programs run June through September and require advance registration.
Madison
Dane County, Wisconsin
Madison is the Midwest's most underrated city and consistently the most livable midsized city in the country according to multiple quality-of-life indices. It is built on an isthmus between Lakes Mendota and Monona, and nearly every major street either crosses or parallels the water, creating a city where kayaking and canoeing are genuinely used as forms of daily transportation by a meaningful percentage of residents.
The Dane County Farmers' Market, held on the Capitol Square from April through November, is the largest producer-only farmers market in the United States. Producer-only means that every vendor grew or made what they're selling; no resellers are admitted. The Saturday market draws 20,000 people on a good morning and is worth building a trip around.
The University of Wisconsin arboretum, a 1,260-acre ecological restoration project established in 1934, contains the oldest restored tallgrass prairie in the world. The prairie sections were reseeded from native stock beginning in 1934 and now look as they did before European settlement, with big bluestem grass reaching six feet by August. The arboretum is free, open dawn to dusk, and receives a fraction of the visitors of the more visible campus attractions.
How the 18 Destinations Compare
| Destination | State | Type | Crowds | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Galena | Illinois | Historic town | Moderate | Architecture, romance |
| Decorah | Iowa | Heritage town | Low | Birding, craft beer, culture |
| Nashville (Brown Co.) | Indiana | Art town | High (fall) | Foliage, art, hiking |
| Stillwater | Minnesota | River town | Moderate | Antiques, books, river |
| Bayfield | Wisconsin | Harbor town | Moderate | Sea kayak, Apostle Islands |
| Hermann | Missouri | Wine / German | High (Oct) | Wine, history, food |
| Saugatuck | Michigan | Art / beach | High (summer) | Art, dunes, ferry |
| Traverse City | Michigan | Lake / wine | High (July-Aug) | Cherries, film, wineries |
| Pella | Iowa | Dutch heritage | Very high (May) | Tulips, Dutch culture |
| Lanesboro | Minnesota | Bluff country | Low-Mod | Biking, theater, Amish |
| Mineral Point | Wisconsin | Cornish / arts | Very low | History, studios, quiet |
| Grand Marais | Minnesota | Harbor / BWCA | Low | Canoe, aurora, art |
| Cahokia Mounds | Illinois | UNESCO site | Very low | Ancient history, archaeology |
| Frankenmuth | Michigan | Bavarian village | High year-round | Food, Christmas, culture |
| Lucas | Kansas | Folk art | Very low | Outsider art, oddity |
| Marquette | Michigan (UP) | Lake / city | Low | Pictured Rocks, biking |
| Door County | Wisconsin | Peninsula | Very high (summer) | Lighthouses, fish boil |
| Madison | Wisconsin | Capital city | Moderate | Food, market, lakes |
The 8-Day Midwest Loop (1,400 miles)
- Day 1-2: Galena, IL. Base here and do Cahokia Mounds as a day trip (3 hrs south, near St. Louis).
- Day 3: Madison, WI. Saturday farmers market if your timing allows. Drive 2.5 hrs north to Door County for evening.
- Day 4-5: Door County + Bayfield, WI. Peninsula drive south to north. Bayfield is 3.5 hrs northwest; stay two nights for a morning sea kayak tour.
- Day 6: Lanesboro, MN. Drive 2 hrs southwest. Rent bikes and ride a section of the Root River Trail.
- Day 7: Decorah, IA. 1.5 hrs south. Visit Vesterheim Museum and Toppling Goliath Brewery.
- Day 8: Return to Galena or Chicago. Pella is 2.5 hrs southwest of Decorah if tulips are in season.
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