August 5th, 2018
St. Cloud, MN

T’was a bountiful day for roadside oddities, my friends.  Truly bountiful.  To find these kinds of treasures renews one’s faith in mankind.  Or something.

When first planning this trip, I had planned on eating breakfast each morning at Panera.  They have excellent coffee and I was once addicted to their breakfast sandwiches.  (I suppose one could add this to beer and Zillow on my list of admitted addictions in this series of posts.)  They are also typically fast and have good free wireless.  Then I decided to change up and try to pick a local eatery each day, to get more of a local experience.

In 1998, humorist and writer Bill Bryson wrote an essay titled Uniformly Awful in his book Notes From a Big Country on the American passion for predictability and uniformity over quality in food.  The canonical example is Mexican food.  No one would claim that Taco Bell serves particularly good Mexican food, but people will pass by any number of local Mexican food restaurants, not daring to take a chance, in order to eat at a predictably mediocre (at best) Taco Bell.  And that’s true even in Southern California, where local Mexican food is generally quite good and sometimes utterly delicious.  Another example is Starbucks in Europe.  There is nothing wrong with Starbucks coffee, but does anyone really believe that Starbuck can teach Europeans anything about making a great cup of coffee?  What Starbucks really excels at is marketing coffee.

But for breakfast I caved and ate at Panera.  It was four miles closer to my motel and had almost immediate freeway access.  I guess even I sometimes prefer uniformity over the chance of quality.

Within the next hour I bagged three roadside oddities.  The day was starting off auspiciously.

First off, a giant bulldog in front of the Road Dawg Diner.  Woof!

Just a short ways down the road, in Janesville, I found Bessie the Giant Cow.  There is no word on why Jessie is there in front of an Arby’s, though apparently it was moved from another location some years ago.  And who can complain in any case?   The milking pail and stool are said to be later additions.  Does that make Bessie an ongoing art project, or is it a bastardization of the original artist’s work?  A hotly debated local topic, no doubt.

Does it not look a little like she’s wearing high heels?

And just another short drive down the road we have Pinkie The Elephant.  Sure, that’s a repeat on pink elephants, but this is a different state and this one has a name.  And eyeglasses.  That makes it okay.

That was three giant animals in less than 90 minutes.  I was almost feeling giddy!  But there was definitely more to come…  Like the giant farmer in Portage.  He’s holding up sausage and cheese which appear to be maybe the only things  Wisconsinites eat.

My list included a couple of things in Wisconsin Dells, but it was home to a Amusement Park and every restaurant of motel there had some kind of silly theme making the place look a little like a mini Las Vegas.  That just sort of cheapened the whole experience.  The Remote Medic has standards, and let no one say otherwise.  We would not have this blog drawn down to the level of cheap tawdry roadside oddities.  That is our pledge to you, Dear Readers.

So I drove on to Oakdale where I found awaiting me a…giant cowboy hat wearing mouse standing on a block of cheese!

And not too far further up the road, another mouse with cheese.

And, lest any naysayers complain about back to back mice with cheese, please keep in mind that this was Wisconsin, which has no lack of mouse/cheese statuary.  And, besides, this one was on the edge of a park that included several rather orange meese.

It was getting nigh on lunchtime and I was feeling rather peckish.  And, based on my anal retentive plan, there was a convenient brewpub just up the road in Osseo.  The Northwoods Brewpub was in a very nicely restored brick factory on the edge of an otherwise sleepy little town.  It seemed a little out of place, though the mediocre food and boring beer were consistent with a tiny rural town.  Not recommended.

But Osseo did have two other things to offer, the first being a giant (or is it just life-size?) bull on the sign for the Almost World Famous Moe’s.  I fear that Moe’s will never achieve its sought after fame as, sadly, it appears to be closed for business.  The bull may well be gone soon.  This may have been a fortuitous chance to see an icon, soon to be faded into history.

However, on a cheerier note, and quite near Moe’s, and apropos of nothing, was a giant rooster.

And you just can’t go wrong with giant chicken statuary!

Nothing much presented itself on the afternoon drive to St. Cloud except this:

For miles and miles, the utility company seems to be building a plank service road for their power transmission towers.  I can’t quite figure it out.  Have we not improved our road technology since Roman times?  Or maybe is wood just so plentiful in this area of the country that it is cheaper than asphalt?  Or maybe they just got a sweet deal on formaldehyde-laden flooring from Lumber Liquidators…

St. Cloud is an interesting, if not terribly exciting, place.  There seems to be a huge immigrant/refugee population here.  Numerous businesses advertising halal foods, or a Somali market, or sections in major grocery stores catering to refugees.  The story here from 2016 states that almost one in six Minnesotans has at least one immigrant parent.

One wonders if there is the same cultural friction here as with immigrant communities in Germany.  I had a number of patients who were German spouses of Army soldiers.  They would visit home and be highly disturbed by the level of cultural conflict between Germans and immigrant communities.

The area around my motel is cheap and borderline seedy.  The historic downtown is a mix of vibrant businesses with sort of funky stuff like you might find near a state college.  There are lots of pawn shops and tattoo parlors here.

My first stop was the Urban Lodge Brewery and Restaurant in the slightly more upscale suburb of Sauk Rapids.  Built from the ground up as a brewery, restaurant, and event location, it was highly commercial, completely lacking in personality, and had boring beer.  Maybe that’s why I was one of only two customers in this huge place at 5:30 (p.m, not a.m.) on a Sunday.  Not recommended.

Because it was walking distance from my cheap hotel, I again caved in and ate a chain this night, opting for the somewhat upscale Granite City Food & Brewery.  The service was excellent and the food quite good.  The Broken Cage Belgian Farmhouse Ale I didn’t care for (too tart), but the Broad Axe Oatmeal Stout was quite good.  No local flavor to the place at all, but no complaints, either.

On to North Dakota for Day 4, with grim prospects in Dickinson for anything like locally brewed beer.  I may have to visit a store in Fargo to see if maybe I can buy something brewed locally to take with me.