state by state speak your mind about...minnesota

[hfojvt]

21. Minn-uh-sewtah, Minn-uh-sewtah, yay, rah, rah, Gophers

I spent five school years sort of living in Minnesota. I found many of the young Minnesotans I met to be obnoxiously arrogant. Like Twintown somehow made Minnesota superior to the rest of the midwest. I dislike large cities in general, but have a special loathing for Twintown.

Growing up in SD, I also rebelled at Minnesota sports teams. The TV stations from Sioux Falls acted like the Vikings and the Twins were OUR teams, even stating as such. I scoffed at that. Our teams? We do NOT live in Mineesota. But I did eventually get over my hatred of the Vikings, because, let's face it, Fran Tarkenton and Chuck Foreman were pretty cool.

Naturally we did some camping in Minnesota, but I cannot remember any pleasant memories from that. Usually it was too cold in the fall when my dad met his brother from Wisconsin. Camping is less fun when you cannot swim, or when you freeze trying to swim in late August. On one trip we even got hit by a tornado at Helmer Myre state park which knocked our camper over and sent dad to the hospital for stitches. The hospital was very well hidden. Stopping for directions, the guy started to tell all the lefts and rights and lefts we needed to take, but then just said "just follow me, I will take you there". At the same time, there was a large group of motorcyclists staying at the park on their way to Sturgis, SD. They made a point of helping to set our camper back upright, but I was disappointed. As many big guys as they had I thought they could have set it down gently, but they just got out of the way and let it slam to the ground - something my dad, brother and myself could have done.

Another campsite we stayed in after a flood, la-qui-parle state park, was legendary for its swarms of moquitoes. We still talk about that. Trying to walk the dog and get two steps down the trail and notice his back is just covered with mosquitoes. Then dad lit a fire and we thought we could sit around that and be mosquito free, but it was like the fire just attracted moquitoes and they went berserk.

I found the spring weather to be unrelentingly awful, much like Wisconsin. The sky just fills with scud and it rains, and rains, and rains for weeks at a time. Any number of times I would be riding back home to SD and would ride in to blue skies and sunshine. It was like the scud stopped at the Minnesota border.

Minnesota used to be reliably liberal, being the only state that didn't vote for Ronald Reagan in 1984. But then later they elected Pawlenty instead of Mondale and long had a string of Republican Governors from Quie to Perpich to Pawlenty. Electoral wise they are more of a swing state than a reliably blue state. They voted for Kerry over Bush by a mere 51% to 47.6% and in 2000 were even worse, Gore winning by a mere 2.4% while Nader got 5.2%