Dallas to Fergus Falls Minnesota-Ingress trip

[DefyLocard]

Hey all! My husband and I leave soon for a roadtrip to Fergus Falls Minnesota. We play Ingress pretty avidly and hope to spend a lot of time on side streets and exploring historic downtowns in an effort to see things people usually just fly on by. If anyone has any suggestions for places we MUsT see, or lodging we might absolutely love, let me know. If there are any fellow Ingress players who have suggestions for places to visit I would love to hear all about them. -DefyLocard

[Southwest Dave]

Hello and welcome to the RTA forums !

There are many road trip planning pages throughout the RTA site, from searching the forums to Road trip routes and attraction links that can be found at the top and bottom of each page. The Mapping tools allows you to create routes and search attractions along them, all tried and tested by RTA contributors ! For more personal advice it will help others to help you by offering as much info as you can. You don't say how much time you have for the trip or whether it's a one way or a round trip, what route(s) you are considering. Until we know more details it's impossible to make meaningful suggestions to 'Downtowns' or Lodgings or other areas that might be of interest to you.

[AZBuck]

Finding the off-the-beaten path is what this site is all about so let's see what we can find for you. As the title of this reply suggests, I'm gong to start at the end of your trip. In Minnesota you can search for the fictional town of Frostbite Falls (pop. 43), which some say is based on International Falls and others say is on the island of Moosylvania in Lake of the Woods. Good Luck!

But, back to reality...

Perhaps the first thing to realize about this trip is that it occurs entirely on the Great Plains, as flat and as wide-open a region as you're going to find. While some may see that as 'boring', we firmly believe that "There are no boring places." The benefit of being flat is that all the roads are pretty much straight and relatively high speed, so there's no need to stick strictly to the Interstates except perhaps around large cities. Smaller cites (which the Interstates bypass) are where the history is. Some examples with an historical bent:

Okemah OK was Woody Guthrie's hometown. The home is no longer there, but there is a tree with his initials carved into it as well as other Guthrieana.

Muskogee OK has both some wreckage of the USS Oklahoma, sunk at Pearl Harbor, and a WWII submarine, the USS Batfish. Even more intriguing is a statue commemorating the first Girl Scout Cookie sale.

Coffeyville KS contains both the Dalton Gang's graves as well as the site where they were gunned down, with filled-in chalk outlines of the four members.

Council Grove KS maintains the stump of the Council Oak where a treaty between the US and the Osage nation in 1825.

Burchard NE has Harold Lloyd's birthplace, but it's by appointment only.

Nebraska City NE: A replica of one of Lewis and Clark's boats.

Adair IA was the site of the first train robbery in the US, by Jesse James no less. There is a monument in town that features the section of track James removed to derail the train.

Algona IA has the Camp Algona POW Museum. We don't often think of the POWs the US held during WWII, but this is one of the places where they were held

Arnolds Park IA was the site of the Spirit Lake Massacre of 1857. There is a monument and grave sites.

Walnut Grove MN is where Laura Ingalls lived before moving to 'The little House on the Prairie' and one can visit her sod hut home (probably a replica).

Note that these attractions lie on a more-or-less straight line from Dallas to Fergus Falls that runs east of Dallas, Oklahoma City, Lincoln and Souix Falls while staying west of Kansas City, Des Moines and Minneapolis/St.Paul. Almost none of them are along an Interstate, which is what makes them lesser-known. So you'll have to find other roads, such as the 'old' US Highway System, to get to them.The main one's in this part of the country are the odd-numbered highways between US-59 and US-79. These tend to have relatively high speed limits so you don't give up much by eschewing the Interstates, and you gain so much more.

AZbuck