How Minnesota Are You?

Find Yourself in the BWCAW
The 1.3-million–acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness tract of boreal forest is home to thousands of lakes and streams, most accessible only by nonmotorized means. Although the virgin red and white pines have long been replaced by new-growth balsams, aspens, and jack pines, the area is one of the last places in America where you can experience accessible wilderness and a kind of silent peace you didn’t know still existed.

Rock with Beethoven, Finn-style
He came from the little-known Lahti Symphony Orchestra in southern Finland to the Minnesota Orchestra in 2003. Within a year, he and the orchestra had embarked on a European tour and a five-year, five-disc recording project of Beethoven’s symphonies. Now, Osmo Vänskä is a rock star in the world of classical music and the orchestra is garnering praise from all four corners of the globe. If you can’t catch them performing Beethoven in concert, pick up a copy of one of their first three recordings. 1111 Nicollet Mall, Mpls., 612-371-5656

Risk Losing Your Hearing at First Avenue
Sitting across the street from Block E and the Hard Rock Café, the black-washed ex-bus depot looks like a sullen teen in the backseat of a station wagon. But First Ave. is long past adolescence—born in 1970, it made it back in the eighties when it starred in Prince movies and hosted Replacement punch-ups. Now it simply goes about its job, hosting loud, angry rock bands seven nights a week. 701 1st Ave. N., Mpls., 612-332-1775

Catch a Play and a Rising Star at One of 100-plus Theaters
Twenty-one-year-old Laura Osnes from Eagan wowed TV viewers to win a starring role as Sandy in Grease  on Broadway. No surprise, she  played Sandy at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatres and Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz at the Children's Theatre  Company. Grey’s Anatomy’s T. R. Knight is a Guthrie alum. With more theater seats per capita than any U.S. city except New York, our theater scene is not to be missed. From the starchitect-designed, Tony Award–winning Guthrie and CTC to smaller venues playing host to up-and-coming productions by Torch, Immigrant, and others, the scene offers mainstream, avant-garde, and everything in between. hennepin theatredistrict.org

Top ’er Off at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Only Gas Station
The gasoline is no more expensive at this little Phillips 66 with its distinctive green tile roof cantilevered over the pumps, sitting on the corner of Highways 33 and 45 in Cloquet. Wright’s late-period futurism is incongruous up here, but the filling station is also notable for its history: It’s the only piece of Wright’s utopian Broadacre City that made it beyond the model shop. Best’s Service Station, 202 Cloquet Ave., Cloquet, 218-879-2279

Summit the Avenue
St. Paul’s crown jewel, its string of mansions along a wide, tree-lined boulevard, is like no other street in the Twin Cities. They let those ramblers in during an era when people didn’t want to live in forty-room homes on double lots. Thank goodness we’re done with that.

Walk Across the Mississippi—on Water
Itasca State Park, Minnesota’s oldest park, is home to the headwaters of North America’s most storied river—so modest here you can literally walk across it. It was just a swamp when the Anishinabe guide Ozawindib led Henry Schoolcraft to it (a dam, fill, and rocks have since been added). The park and its virgin pines are splendid; good for memories that last a lifetime. 218-266-2100

Recite Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha to Your Lover at Minnehaha Park
The most famous American poem of the nineteenth century, the epic saga of the Iroquois warrior Hiawatha and his lover, Minnehaha, was written by an East Coast poet who never actually visited the falls that he preserved in heroic Viking meter. Find a copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s masterpiece, lay a picnic out under the statue of Hiawatha and Minnehaha, and compete with the roar of the Laughing Water itself for your paramour’s attention. 4801 Minnehaha Ave. S., Mpls., 612-230-6400

Go to a Big 10 Basketball Game at The Barn
The unique raised floor, the tight seating, the hothouse ambiance with 14,625 screaming fans. The 1928 Williams Arena—our Wrigley Field—is the most exciting sports venue in Minnesota. With Tubby in the house, expect Gold. Score extra points if you know what ski-u-mah means. 1925 University Ave. SE, Mpls., 612-624-3514, gophersports.com

Pay Your Respects at Lakewood Cemetery
City founders Charles Lowry, T. B. Walker, and William Washburn are buried there. So are Paul Wellstone and Hubert Humphrey. But the 1871 250-acre cemetery holds above-ground treasures too. Walk the grounds and view beautiful statuary,  the Lowry–Goodrich Mausoleum (a replica of the Parthenon); the Community Mausoleum, filled with chandeliers, and stained glass, and Impressionist paintings; and the chapel, built in 1909 with amazing Byzantine mosaics. The garden-inspired grounds, patterned after the rural cemeteries of nineteenth-century France, are a horticulturalist’s delight. 612-822-2171