Lake Pepin

Ok, so way back in August, not long after we got to Minnesota, we took a drive around "Lake Pepin".  I still have a hard time thinking of it as a lake because really it is the Mississippi River, but really wide and really slow moving and everyone around here calls it Lake Pepin.  We went down the Minnesota side and then across the river in Wabasha and up the Wisconsin side.  It is really a beautiful drive and I wanted to tell Jake every few minutes to stop so I could take some pictures, but I mostly refrained and tried to just enjoy the ride.  We did stop just as the sun was going down at a "wayside", better know in Utah as a rest area, to better enjoy the view.  We are going to take the drive again next weekend so see the leaves changing and I am sure going to take lots of pictures then, I hope.  But here are a few I took from this trip.

The kids all climbed on the wall with me while I was taking pictures of the river, I mean lake, and I had to take a few of them cause it was so cute to see them staggered like that.  

The beautiful Mississippi River, aka Lake Pepin.

Here's one of Ashton being silly.  He kept saying he wanted to go for a swim.  

This nastiness was one thing I did make Jake stop to take a picture of.  There are marsh lands all along the sides of the river, some worse than others.  This isn't the actual side of the river, but one of the marsh lands along the edge of the river valley. After seeing all this stagnant water around it's no wonder the mosquitos are so bad here.  As beautiful and the river itself is, this part is just gross.

And now I realize why they call this the land of 10,000 lakes.  There really is water everywhere and if its a puddle they call it a lake.  Unfortunately, most of them look just like this.  No one would ever actually get in it.  Well unless you are a bug  ;)