Road Tips

Minnesota Vacation - 2020

With pent-up frustration from being stuck at home for the last five-plus months, my wife and I threw caution to the wind and decided to take some time off recently and head out on a weeklong vacation.  We headed up north to Minnesota - not quite mirroring our trip to Minnesota from last year - but heading further north to the Bemidji area, approximately 100 miles south of the Canadian border.  I remember being in Bemidji and the surrounding area when I was young and it was sort of fun to try and remember some of the things we saw on this trip.  

For our time away, I wanted to find some place where we could stay in relative comfort, but be on a lake.  I've gone long past the urge to pitch a tent somewhere and I like to say that my idea of camping is leaving the window open at the hotel at night.  Since I'm a Lifetime Hilton Honors Diamond Member and have a boatload of points - even though I haven't traveled since March - I did a Google search for "Hilton properties on a lake."  It took me to a web site that listed about five or six Hilton hotel properties on lakes around the U.S.  The first one listed was the Bemidji Doubletree Hotel.  I was sort of intrigued as it had been years since I had been in Bemidji.  We spent a few days last summer at a Hampton Inn in Spicer, MN, but Spicer and the surrounding area didn't offer much in terms of food choices.  And since we like to try different restaurants out when we go on trips, I sort of figured that Bemidji - being much larger than Spicer - would probably have ample choices of places to eat in and around the area.

We had missed a chance to head to California for our 25th wedding anniversary earlier this year, so we were understandably disappointed when the pandemic pretty much took away those plans.  But we figured that if we drove to some place that wasn't a big population center and could sort of watch out for ourselves if big crowds developed, we would be fine.  The Bemidji area sounded like the perfect spot for us.    

In my years of being a Hilton Honors member, I've found that most Doubletree hotels that I've found are usually older hotels that were sort of run-down.  It was like Hilton took over what were at one time some very nice properties that had grown tired over the years and slapped the Doubletree name on the front.  But that was very far from the truth with this particular hotel.  It had been completed in 2014 and featured six floors of very nice rooms.  It was connected with the Bemidji Hampton Inn & Suites and both hotels shared a Green Mill bar and restaurant.  (see map)  My wife and I went into the Green Mill one night to get a drink and the smell of the old grease from the fryers almost made my wife gag.  It was pretty bad.  We decided to take our drinks back up to our room instead of hanging at the bar.  

The hotels were built on the grounds of the original Crookston Lumber Mill which was built in the early 1900's by Eastern investors hoping to cash in on what was a large amount of ample timber in forests in the surrounding area.  At one point in time, over 2000 men worked at what was the nation's second largest lumber mill which ran 24 hours a day, 7 days a week processing wood that would be shipped all over the U.S.  However, a massive fire in 1924 destroyed the sawmill and over 24,000,000 board feet of white pine timber valued at $750,000 (or $11.3 million dollars in today's money).  By that time, however, most of the north woods of Minnesota had been cut out and the mill's owners decided not to rebuild and moved on to more timberland in the Pacific Northwest.  

When I was six years old, I was traveling with my family to Lake of the Woods in extreme southwestern Ontario where my late-great uncle had a lodge that became sort of a favorite family destination when I was growing up.  (The lodge - Reel 'Em Inn - is still there.  My family sold it in the early 70's and it has changed hands a few times over the years.  Click here to go to their web site.)  On this trip, we stopped for the night in Bemidji and stayed at a motel.  That motel is long gone but my wife and I deduced over dinner one evening that it had to be the old Edgewater Hotel where we stayed.  Well, it turns out from talking with a couple locals that the Hampton Inn and Doubletree sit on the site of the former Edgewater Hotel that was torn down in 2002.  I was sort of amazed when I realized that I was literally staying at the same location when I was six years old - only in a different hotel.  

The Doubletree had rooms that faced Lake Bemidji and we got a room on the top floor with a balcony.  The views were excellent.  The first day we were there, the wind was coming directly off the lake and we kept the sliding glass door open that night to sleep with the cool breeze and to hear the loons on the lake.  Actually, I think I only heard one loon the whole time we were there.  The hotel had beach facilities and you could rent paddle boats and kayaks to take out onto the lake.  

Another great thing about the Bemidji area are the number of bike paths in the area.  The terrain is pretty flat and there are miles and miles of bike paths around the lake that includes the Paul Bunyan Bike Trail, a 106 mile trail that goes from Bemidji down to Brainerd, MN.  The hotel also had bikes for rent and we thought about renting a couple bikes one day - until we inspected them.  They were a little tired and tattered, and we didn't want to be 10 miles away from the hotel and have a bike break down. 

The hotels had dock facilities, as well, with benches on the docks.  It was nice to head down to the docks - dodging the spider webs that would magically show up overnight after being knocked down by hotel personnel each day - and hang out looking at the clear waters of Lake Bemidji.  We also found a nice little park near the campus of Bemidji State University where we could sit in Adirondack chairs to read and look out over the lake.  

Also along the lake front in Bemidji are the world famous statues of Paul Bunyan and his faithful companion Babe, the Blue Ox.  Paul Bunyan is a mythical hero who was concocted in northwoods logging camps over 125 years ago.  Tales spun about Paul's larger than life frame and persona gave loggers something to laugh and dream about in even the most adverse conditions.  In the early 1900's, Paul Bunyan's heroic stories were first published in books and newspapers in the northern United States and Canada. By the 1920's and into the 1930's, Paul Bunyan became a large part of American folklore, a beloved figure who worked the northern timber with the help of Babe, an oxen who - according to one of many story-tellers who added to the Paul Bunyan mystique - had been rescued from an ice drift by Paul, but not until it had turned blue.  The city of Bemidji, hoping to drive tourists to the area, built the statues of Paul and Babe in 1937 in conjunction with a carnival the city put on.  In 1988, the statues were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  But by the turn of the century, the statues had deteriorated due to wear and tear.  In 2006 the local Rotary club raised just over $50,000 dollars to go along with a $68,000 federal grant to refurbish the statues of Paul and Babe.  They looked pretty good to me when we were there.

Now, when I was six years old and I first saw the Paul and Babe statues, I thought they were the biggest things in the world.  When I got back there so many years later, when I first saw them I said to my wife, "OK, where's the bigger statues?"  I mean, these weren't all that small - Paul stands 28 feet high - but I just remember as a little kid that these things were towering!  Of course, the trees weren't behind the statues all those years ago, so the perspective may have been skewed.  But still, I was sort of taken aback at how small they looked to me after all these years.  (Well, as a little kid, I always thought the house I grew up in was huge - 3 bedrooms, 1 1/2 baths, living room, den.  But now when I walk into the place - my sister lives in the old farmhouse now - I marvel at how small it is to me and wonder just how in the hell 8 people ever lived in a house so damned small.)

At one point in time, Kodak proclaimed that Paul and Babe were the second most photographed statues in the United States - only behind Mount Rushmore.  Now, I find this rather incredulous on a number of levels.  First of all, I may have stretched my description of the statues as being "world famous".  Secondly, I think of Mount Rushmore as more of a sculpture than a statue.  (But, I guess all statues are really sculptures.)  And I think that Kodak conveniently forgot about the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial when they did their surveys of most photographed statues.  I can't believe that people at one time took more pictures of the statues of Paul and Babe in little Bemidji, MN than pictures were taken of the Statue of Liberty.  

With the pandemic, we were wondering what the rules were for restaurants and public buildings before we left.  I called the hotel and was told that masks were mandatory in public places, stores and restaurants.  You could take your mask off once you were seated in a restaurant, but if you got up to, say, use the restroom, you had to have your mask on.  Actually, we didn't find it too intrusive and it really became force of habit for us to just take our masks anywhere and put them on before we went in a building.

However, if you know anything about northern Minnesota, you'll know that most residents up there don't like to be told what to do by the government.  When Governor Tim Walz declared in late June of this year that masks were required in buildings and restaurants, not a lot of people north of St. Cloud were happy about that.  In fact, a local group started a campaign against Walz and his ideas about masking up.  We were driving down the highway one day and came upon a billboard showing the feelings of many people in the area when it came to the governor's edict on mask.  The group sponsoring the billboards called themselves the "Rocks and Cows of the North" because Governor Walz disparaged the region during his campaign saying that they only thing in northern Minnesota were rocks and cows.  The billboard pretty summed up the feelings of many people in the area.  But for the most part, we found the vast majority - probably 98 percent of the people we encountered - were wearing masks.  One restaurant owner told us, "At first people bitched about it, but after a couple weeks a lot of those people just decided to quit belly-aching and wear a mask."  (Photo of billboard courtesy KVRR-TV in Fargo, ND.)  

A couple things sort of got me wondering about Bemidji while we were there.  First off, I was amazed at the number of chiropractors in the area.  After getting back to the hotel one day, I did a quick Google search for chiropractors in the immediate Bemidji area and there were over 20 clinics listed.  Now, we come from the birthplace of chiropractic medicine and we have a lot of chiropractors in the Quad Cities.  But for a city the size of Bemidji (about 15,500 people) we figured that there was 1 chiropractor for 675 residents.  

Secondly, we kept seeing little signs and phrases around town that called Bemidji the "1st City".  Well, I knew from junior high history classes that Bemidji couldn't have been the first city founded in Minnesota.  I was sort of dumbfounded as to why they called themselves the "1st City" until I saw a sign one day that signified Bemidji as the "first city on the Mississippi River."  The source of the Mississippi is Lake Itasca, about 30 miles south and west of Bemidji as the crow flies.  And it is, indeed, the first city on the Mississippi as the river feeds Lake Bemidji from the south before it continues on from the east side of the lake.  

Now, being a lifelong geography geek who is enamored with borders, beginnings and ends, I had to go to the source of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca.  Well, and the fact that I've lived in a city along the Mississippi River for the past 29 years.  It was a quick 35 minute drive from our hotel in Bemidji to the Mary Gibbs Mississippi Headwaters Center near the north entrance to Lake Itasca State Park.  

After paying a $7.00 daily fee to use the park, we pulled into the parking lot at the center and took a path down to a viewing area of the source of the Mississippi.  It was basically like what I had seen in pictures over the years.  There was the wooden sign declaring this spot to be the source of the Mississippi River stood on one side of a rock barrier that you could walk across - and many people were.  (For a live web cam of the headwaters of the Mississippi River, you can click here.)  

The water was clean and clear, a marked difference from the muddy waters we have flowing past us on the Mississippi back home.  The start of the Mississippi was nothing more than a babbling brook slowly making its way from Lake Itasca.

There was a nice wooden walkway that we took along the first few yards of the river's edge.  Down a ways from the source, the small river took a sharp turn toward the east and a small bridge crossed the stream - the first of many bridges to cross the Mississippi on its way to the Gulf of Mexico over 2500 miles downstream.    

Lake Itasca is one of the more popular state parks in Minnesota.  It was established in 1891 making it the oldest state park in Minnesota.  Lake Itasca State Park sits on over 32,000 total acres and there are more than 100 lakes within its boundaries.  The main Lake Itasca has a nice scenic drive around it with some places where you can stop and take paths to get some scenic view and take in nature.  It was worth the $7 bucks we spent.  

Another spot that I remember from my family travels as a youth was the town of Blackduck, about 25 miles northeast of Bemidji.  I only remember Blackduck from the large black duck statue that they had at one of the intersections that went through town.  ("Go straight at the black duck in Blackduck" was one of our favorite sayings on the way to Baudette, MN where we would cross the border.)   Well, my wife's father had mentioned something about Blackduck when we told him where we were going and he said, "You know, we were up there about 15 years ago and we went into a gift shop.  They had a little black duck statue that was like the big statue they had in town and I wish I would have gotten it."  

Well, hell, we had driven 600 miles from the Quad Cities to Bemidji.  What's another 25 miles to get a black duck for my father-in-law?  

Blackduck is like many Minnesota towns that are on the way to the Canadian border from the Twin Cities.  When we would go to Canada years and years ago, it was mostly two-lane roadways that went through places like Little Falls, Brainerd, Walker, Cass Lake, Bemidji and Blackduck.  However, since the last time I made the two-lane highway trek with my late father, my brother, and my late brother-in-law to the lodge on Lake of the Woods a number of years ago, those two-lane roads have been replaced by four-lane highways that by-pass many of the towns.  And the things that you used to see along the way - like the Paul Bunyan and Babe statues - well, you don't see them any longer unless you go into town.  And that's what happened with the black duck statue at Blackduck.  

The original black duck statue in Blackduck sat at a small park in the center of town.  That park is now the site of a funeral home.  The duck was moved next to the Blackduck fire department a number of years ago.  This duck was crafted from concrete in 1942 and is actually the second large black duck statue the town had.  The first one, we were told, looked pretty bad and was destroyed.  

The "new" black duck statue is in a park on the west side of town along Highway 71.  This one is made from fiberglass and is a more realistic depiction of a duck compared to the decoy-like figure the old black duck statue portrays.  We were told that locals still bicker about the two ducks as there is an "old duck" camp and a "new duck" camp.  

We did find a small gift shop in Blackduck and we did find a small black duck statuette that I bought for my father-in-law.  The owner filled us in on the history of the ducks, the "new duck" vs. "old duck" factions and the number one question he gets from people, "OK, so where's the BIG black duck?"  I, too, thought the original black duck next to the fire station was sort of puny in size from what I remember.  But that was also a long time ago and I thought the Paul Bunyan statue was relatively small from what I remember it being.  "For some reason people think that when we put up the new duck out by the highway, we got rid of the old duck and put up a half-scale size statue of it by the firehouse," he told us.  "But, nope.  That's the original black duck."  My wife and I are firmly on Team "Old Duck".  

Another thing Bemidji is famous for is being the proclaimed "Curling Capital of the United States."  They take curling very seriously in Bemidji and a number of local curlers have represented the country in various Winter Olympics over the years.  Now, I love curling - how can you not love a sport that basically encourages you to drink as you play?  

Well, they have a curling club in Bemidji - the Bemidji Curling Club which is located on the west side of the city.  (see map)  And, dammit, I wanted a Bemidji Curling Club t-shirt.  We drove out there one afternoon and found the place was locked up tighter than a drum.  My wife tried calling the number they had listed on their web site and it was disconnected.  I had already picked up a Bemidji State Hockey t-shirt from one of the shops in downtown Bemidji, so I was hellbent on getting a Bemidji Curling Club shirt.  But there were none to be found.  We talked with a number of people who really didn't know why it was shut down.  "Summertime, I think," said one young lady at the t-shirt shop where I bought the Bemidji State Hockey shirt.  "Nobody wants to be indoors in the summer," another guy told us.  "I thought their office was open, but if you got a disconnection message when you called, then who knows," a lady working at a restaurant told us.  We decided that we'd contact them after we got back home.  I'd LOVE a Bemidji Curling Club t-shirt.

One of the more whimsical moments in our travels to Minnesota was at our hotel in St. Cloud, MN where we stopped for the night on our way up to Bemidji.  (It's a nine hour journey from home to Bemidji and my wife can't handle being in a car much more than six hours at a time.)  When we pulled into the hotel, the Planters Nutmobile was in the parking lot.  And it was still there when we were getting ready to leave the next morning.  We just had one of the Oscar Mayer Weinermobiles in the Quad Cities for about a week and it was sort of funny to see the Weinermobile and the Nutmobile in the space of five days.  

Speaking of St. Cloud, my wife wanted to head back to the Munsinger Gardens that we had visited last year on our vacation to Minnesota.  We especially wanted to see the Clemons Rose Garden as the rose bushes had been hit hard during the previous winter last year and they were in the process of replanting a number of bushes in the garden area.  The rose garden was much nicer this year and we got a few ideas for possible varieties of roses to plant in our rose garden back home. It was a great morning stroll at the start of a cool Minnesota day.  Everything was so lush and green - not only at the Munsinger Gardens, but throughout our trip to Northern Minnesota.  They had definitely gotten a lot more rain this summer up there than what we have had in Iowa which now has abnormally dry to extremely dry drought conditions across the state.  

The weather the week we were there, for the most part, was beautiful.  As I said, it was a little cool when we got to Bemidji, but it turned out to be perfect weather for the vast majority of time we spent there.  Only one day did it rain - one morning we heard thunder off in the distance around 5 a.m.  It started to rain pretty well after that and when we got out of bed around 8 a.m., it was still raining off and on.  But by the time we went to get coffee at one of the coffee shops around 10:00 a.m., the rain had stopped.  By 11:00 a.m, the sun had come out and by noon, you couldn't tell that it had even rained, save for a few puddles here and there.  Highs each day were in the low to mid 80's - with the exception of the first day when it made it to only 72 degrees.  And the day we left, we woke up to heavy fog over the lake and low clouds.  My wife remarked that it's much easier to leave a vacation destination when the weather is crappy versus when it's still beautiful out.  

It was a great vacation, to say the least.  It was very nice to get away for a short while and we contemplated staying a day or two longer before we decided to start heading back home.  And we did what you're supposed to do on a vacation - we read books along the lake, we took walks on the bike path around the lake, we napped in the afternoon, we drank some good craft beers, we slept in in the mornings, we ate at some good to very good places - although we did miss going to Red Stu Breakfast Bar, Fozzie's Smokin' Barbecue and a little gourmet hot dog stand called Lucky Dogs (my wife vetoed that one, but next time, yes) - we explored the surrounding areas, we hung out on our hotel room deck admiring the lake, and we did what you're supposed to do on a vacation - just relax.  With all that has been going on with the world over the past few months, it was certainly good to just relax for a few days with little to no worries.   

A Look Back at 10 North Main - Minot, ND

As the pandemic continues, my travel schedule has been curtailed with only cautious optimism that I'll be able to start to get back out to see accounts starting sometime in September.  Of course, that means that I haven't been able to get out and visit new restaurants except for around my immediate home area.  Since last spring, I've been posting some of the more memorable restaurants that I've visited over the years.

Today's look back is a tale of a famous Hollywood actor - a "local-boy-does-good' kind of story - who brought big city dining to a small town where some of the citizens really didn't appreciate the fact that a great restaurant like this is in their backyard.  It was a good 12 year run for this place before it closed its doors in early 2017.  However, three locals who DID see the value in having a restaurant like this in the small city did re-open the doors to the restaurant in the fall of 2017.  Here is my blog post from nearly 10 years ago on my visit to 10 North Main in Minot, ND.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I had set up a morning appointment with a dealer in Minot, ND and arrived the evening before.  I stayed at a Fairfield Inn on the outskirts of the town and the choices for restaurants in the immediate area were limited to chains, such as Buffalo Wings and Rings - a knock-off of Buffalo Wild Wings; and Paradiso - a North Dakota five-location chain of Mexican restaurants.  I asked the young lady at the front desk of the Fairfield Inn where I could get a really good meal in town.  She didn't hesitate and replied, "Oh, you'll want to go to 10 North Main.  It's downtown and it's very good.  It's, by far, the best restaurant for miles around."  She gave me quick directions and I took off toward downtown Minot. 

Even beyond the restaurants around the hotel, there's not much to choose from in Minot.  And that's probably why four guys who grew up in Minot chose to open a fine dining establishment in town.  Friends Chad Schmidt, Jon Peterson, Josh Duhamel and Lance Behm opened the restaurant in January of 2005.  Schmidt is the managing partner of the restaurant while Peterson is the chef.  Behm is a local Minot dentist and Duhamel, well, he's a somewhat famous Hollywood actor.

Josh Duhamel (pronounced Duh-MEL) grew up in Minot and has starred in the movie "Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!" (he played Tad Hamilton), as well as in both of the Transformers movies (a third Transformers movie is coming out next year).  For four seasons, Duhamel was also seen on the television drama "Las Vegas".  But he's possibly most famous as being the husband of Stacy Ferguson, a.k.a. "Fergie" who fronted the group "The Black Eyed Peas".  I understand that Duhamel and Fergie make it back to Minot from time to time (I believe his parents - his father was an advertising salesman and his mother was a teacher - still live in town) and dine at 10 North Main when in town.  As one of my dealers in North Dakota told me, "I can't believe a guy from North Dakota married Fergie!"

"Good Food and Nice Drinks" is the motto for 10 North Main.  It's situated in a building - at 10 North Main, naturally - just across from the Soo Line Train and Transportation Museum in downtown Minot (see map).  The exterior of the building is a mixture of brick, stained glass windows on the first level and large tinted windows that light up the second level of the restaurants. 

It was just after 8 p.m. on a warm North Dakota evening when I stopped into 10 North Main.  Two 20-something girls were at the hostess stand and I remarked to them, "I understand this is the best restaurant in Minot."

They sort of looked at one of another and one of the girls said, "Well, yeah, I guess so."  It was not quite the ringing endorsement I expected to hear after my statement.  One of the girls took me to a two-seat table along a short wall and dropped off a menu.  My waitress for the evening, Anna - a cherub-faced young lady with pig tails in her hair - came by to greet me.  If someone were to say, "Show me a typical, wholesome North Dakota girl", Anna would be the one.  I told her that I would probably have some wine with dinner, but for the time being I really needed a Bud Light.  Well, actually, I needed two.  It had been a long drive out to Minot from Grand Forks.     

The interior of the restaurant was warm and inviting giving it a very laid back feel to the place.  The dining room was segmented into three areas - I sat in the middle area - and there was a small bar area in the front corner of the restaurant with one of the stained glass windows helping provide light to the bar.  I'm not good at describing furnishings, but the place sort of had a contemporary antique look to it - if there is such a thing. 

The menu at 10 North Main was an interesting mix of beef, pasta dishes, smoked entrees including smoked duck and smoked pheasant, and a handful of both seafood and fresh water fish entrees to choose from.  I was hoping the food would be as good as the menu was making it sound. 

Anna came back and told me that they were out of prime rib for the evening - that was fine, I wasn't going to do prime rib - and she told me of a couple specials that I immediately lost interest in.  I told her that I needed a little time to look through the menu and she went to wait on other people.  I was looking at a couple three items on the menu.  First on my list of interest was the bison New York strip - a 12 oz. lean piece of North Dakota-raised bison, seasoned and grilled over white oak wood.  But I'd had a steak the night before at The Toasted Frog in Grand Forks and I wasn't certain I wanted steak two nights in a row. 

I was also looking at getting a half rack of the smoked baby-back ribs at 10 North Main.  The menu said they topped the ribs with a homemade "sweet and snarky" barbecue sauce.  I was tempted to find out what sweet and snarky tasted like.  Lastly, I thought briefly about getting the Chilean sea bass - a sauteed sea bass filet served with asparagus.  But thinking that it's a long way from Chile to Minot, ND,  I decided to stay local.  

Anna came back and I told her that I wanted to start out with 10 North Main's caprese salad, then I had to quickly decide between the bison strip steak or the ribs.  If it's cooked right, bison steaks are pretty damn good.  I was hoping that would be the case and I ordered the bison steak - rare.  A side of garlic-mashed potatoes and a vegetable medley also came with the steak. 

I asked Anna to leave the wine list as I was probably going to get a glass of wine or two with my meal.  The wine list was surprising featuring dozens of very good wines at somewhat reasonable prices.  Also surprising was the amount of wines they featured by the glass.  A full bottle of the Liberty School cabernet was $25 dollars, a fair price for a good-valued wine that we like to drink at home from time to time.  I knew I couldn't drink a full bottle of wine, but one of the many wines by the glass they featured at 10 North Main was the Liberty School cab for $7.00.  When Anna came back with my caprese salad and a basket of bread, I told her that I'd like a glass of that.  "Good choice," she said as she scribbled down my wine order.

The caprese salad was good, but not quite as good as the one I had in Grand Forks the night before.  The tomatoes weren't as ripened as the one at The Toasted Frog, but 10 North Main's caprese salad had a hefty amount of fresh basil on top and a lot more mozzarella cheese than the one from Grand Forks.  The fresh basil and wonderful mozzarella more than made up for the under-ripened tomatoes.

I do also want to mention the homemade bread with the garlic/parmesan butter at 10 North Main.  Outstanding!  I made short work of the two pieces Anna had brought out with the salad and was afraid to get more because I didn't want to be eating bread instead of my steak.  Actually, what was more addicting was the garlic/parmesan butter.  I slathered both pieces with the butter and happily wolfed it down. 

Not long after I finished my caprese salad, Anna brought out my steak.  I thought it looked sort of small for a 12 oz. steak, but there wasn't really anything I could do about it.  I was also afraid that it was over-cooked from the char-marks on the outside.  But I cut into the steak and it was definitely rare.

I'm glad I got the bison strip because after the bad cut of meat I had at The Toasted Frog the night before I needed a good piece of beef to make things right in my world.  And it was a great piece of meat - tender, lean and about as juicy as a piece of bison can be.  The seasoning on the steak was sort of a mixture of salt, garlic, pepper and some other spices.  It worked well with the taste of the meat. 

The garlic mashed potatoes were OK, nothing really special to get excited about.  I had a couple bites of potatoes and a couple bites of the vegetable medley.  The medley of sliced carrots, zucchini, broccoli and cauliflower were cooked just right - warm, yet with a crunch with each bite.

I finished my steak and had one more bite of the potatoes before I let Anna take my plate away.  She got a nice tip for the evening being very attentive, but not bugging me at the same time. 

I was thoroughly impressed with my meal at 10 North Main.  This is a restaurant that could easily hold it's own in a much larger city.  I'm hoping that the people in Minot know just how good this place is and don't take it for granted.  In a city full of buffet and family restaurants, along with fast food and regional chain establishments, 10 North Main stands out as being one of the best restaurants in not only the city of Minot, but in the whole state of North Dakota. 

Derecho!

If 2020 hasn't given us enough problems with the worldwide pandemic, we've had a couple of weather issues this year that have completely knocked us for a loop.  In April, a hail storm damaged hundreds of houses in the Quad Cities - some are still getting new roofs, siding and gutters from that event.  But on Monday, something even more destructive that affected millions of people from Nebraska to Indiana occurred - a rare derecho storm that started early in the morning and pushed across the Midwest throughout the day.  The above picture is an hour-by-hour timeline of the storm as it made its way from eastern Nebraska into western Ohio.  (Photo courtesy National Weather Service)

As I said, back in April we had a hail storm that blew through on what had started out as a beautiful early Spring evening with a full moon rising out of the southeast sky.  This was after the first day we had hit 80° degrees (F) in 2020.  Storms had developed to the northwest of the Quad Cities and a series of severe thunderstorm warnings were issued.  With one storm that was approaching the area, the National Weather Service predicted that it would slide to the north and east of where we lived.  My wife and I sat out in front of our house watching the storm gain intensity.  The cloud-to-cloud lightning was intense and we continued to think that it was going to go past us.  Then we noticed that the lightning was directly above us and scattered large drops of rain began to hit the pavement.  We went inside, down to our family room and turned on a movie. 

As we were watching the movie, about 15 minutes in I thought I heard something like a set of keys or some rocks that had been accidentally left in a pocket of a pair of pants that were in the dryer.  The only problem was that our dryer wasn't on.  When I finally realized that it was probably hail, we ran upstairs and looked out our backdoor into our yard in time to see golf-ball sized hailstones pelting our house, my car, our trees, our deck, etc.  

We were lucky, however.  We had just had a new roof put on about a year and a half prior and it suffered minimal damage because we had A) paid through the nose for high-quality shingles; and B) used a high-quality roofing company to do the work.  The only damage were to some cap shingles and the gutters.  Compared to neighbors up and down our street and behind us who had massive roof and siding damage, we got off pretty easy.  

But, the weather in the spring was certainly fickle.  Four days after we had the hail storm, we had 3 inches of snow.  In mid-April.  And three days after that, we got 3 more inches of snow.  Granted, most of the snow was melted by noon those two days, but still... It's mid-April!  There's supposed to be daffodils, tulips, green grass, and trees starting to bud.  Combined with no baseball starting up due to all the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a bummer of an April.

May wasn't much better.  There was a stretch in mid-May - including our 25th wedding anniversary - where we didn't see the sun or temperatures higher than 57° (F) over a six day period.  I half-jokingly asked my friends on Facebook if a person could get Seasonal Affective Disorder in the spring.  (One of my friends who is a nurse replied with an emphatic "YES, YOU CAN!")

June came and the summer months have been very nice.  There's been no outdoor events this year thanks to the pandemic, so there's been a lot of hanging with the neighbors and sitting on our deck enjoying the weather.  We really haven't had any large weather to speak of other than a spell of hot and humid weather - which, to me, is wonderful.  

We had been hearing over the previous weekend about the chance of storms coming through on Monday afternoon.  By Monday morning, local television meteorologists were warning that storms would gain strength across the state of Iowa with a heightened risk of strong to severe storms occurring that afternoon.  

The first thing I heard of the impact of the storm was on Monday morning from a friend in Nebraska whose work van took a direct hit from a tree that fell into it.  He wasn't inside, thank god.  But it thoroughly ruined his Monday.

Then a couple hours later I started getting reports of the storm impacting parts of Des Moines and central Iowa.  Ames was hit pretty hard, but then reports of heavy damage in Marshalltown (where winds hit nearly 100 mph) and in Newton started to come in on social media.  The Cellar Peanut Pub in Newton (click here to see the Road Tips entry on the Cellar Peanut Pub) lost part of their wall and their roof in the storm.    (Photo above right courtesy Cellar Peanut Pub - Newton Facebook page.)

Suddenly, reports started coming in from Cedar Rapids where wind speeds of over 100 mph had wreaked havoc on the city.  Now, my father-in-law has a farmstead south and east of Cedar Rapids and I had called him earlier in the morning to wish him happy birthday - it was his 80th birthday.  He said that he and his lady friend were heading out from her house in North Liberty to the farm to do some work.  I told him that I had heard some storms were supposed to come in sometime in the afternoon.  He said that he had heard we may get some rain, but he didn't know about any storms.  

When my wife - who grew up in Cedar Rapids - found out that the city was getting pummeled, she called her father out at his farm.  She asked what he was doing and he said that they were about ready to go get into the car and get out of there.  "Where you going to go," she asked him.  

He thought about it for a moment and said, "Well, I really don't know.  Back to North Liberty, I guess."  

By the time he had gotten off the phone and almost opened the door to go outside, a massive gust of wind knocked one of his maple trees onto his car, making it inoperable.  It was an old Buick and I was talking to him about it the next day and he was more upset that he wasn't going to be able to get 300,000 miles on the car.  "It had a great engine," he said.  "I would have been able to get 300,000 on it easily.  Now they'll probably just total it."  My wife was thankful that she made the phone call because, as she pointed out, they probably would have been either inside the car or just outside the car when the tree hit it.  

Following the storm on National Weather Service radar, as well as on local television which had broken in with on-going weather bulletins, we figured the storm would hit the Quad Cities around 1:30 p.m.  That allowed me to go outside and bring in both our American and Hawaiian flags, our hanging baskets, secure larger pots up close to the house, take in our umbrella, and make sure our garden peppers and tomatoes were tied up.  

It came quick.  We were watching one of the local stations that had a downtown Davenport tower camera as the front line of wind gusts emanating from a line of very dark clouds lined up in west Davenport and started to blow dust across the site of the former Kraft Foods plant just west of downtown Davenport.  The dust cloud enveloped the north end of the Centennial Bridge connecting Davenport with Rock Island and soon inundated LeClaire Park.  It was less than two minutes later when the first gusts hit our house.  

We were experiencing a derecho - a rare meteorological event that features a line of fast moving severe storms that can go for hundreds of miles and stretch over 100 miles in length from top to bottom.  Wind speeds usually sustain around 40 to 50 mph with gusts approaching - and easily surpassing - hurricane strength at times.  The wind damage usually occurs in just one direction and is usually known as "straight-line winds".  A derecho (de-RAY-cho) can stay together for long periods of time (as shown in the time-line picture at the top of this post) and their strong winds can last for much longer periods than a normal severe thunderstorm.  We had a derecho in the Quad Cities about 14 or 15 years ago, but this one was much stronger and lasted much, much longer.  

For the next 45 minutes, I have to tell you - I have never been in a storm where the sustained winds were so high for so long.  Mixed in with the high sustained winds over that period of time that were well over 40 mph were 8 or 9 gusts that clocked as high as 89 mph at the Davenport airport.  I have to tell you - and I don't mind saying so - there were at least 3 times when I was scared, as in "Holy shit!" scared.  

We never did go down to our basement - probably a stupid thing.  But it also hearkens back to when I was a little kid and we would sometimes sit outside watching the approaching storm come with a wall of rain racing over the fields west of our house.  I can remember sitting on the roof on a handful of occasions watching storms come in when I was younger.  Of course, I also rode a bike while not wearing a helmet, drank directly out of the water hose, and never wore a seat belt - especially in the back of pick-up trucks.  Kids these days don't know how much fun there is in dangerous situations.  

The wind blew branches, leaves, garbage bins, roofing material and whatever else down the street and across yards from west to east.  Our power went out at 1:46 p.m. and we figured that it would be out for quite sometime.  I would go to the front door and open it up from time to time to look out.  Then a gust from hell would come through whipping the trees back and forth.  I would immediately shut the door and back away into the center of the house.  

We heard a huge "whomp!" not long into the initial throes of the storm.  A large limb from our neighbor's large maple tree fell on our power line.  The power line stayed intact, but the tension guide wire that supported the power wires from the transformer pole to our house had snapped.  Thankfully, the limb soon dropped to the ground and no other large limb hit the wire.  The maple tree in our neighbor's yard has been a point of concern for us for a number of years as it's A) over 60 years old, and B) hangs over a significant portion of our house and deck.  I have to say that if Monday's storm didn't bring it down, nothing ever will.  (Of course, watch it collapse or drop a huge limb on a sunny day with light winds.)  

(UPDATE - We had reported the broken tension wire to MidAmerican Energy after the storm, and the following Sunday evening a team of power contractors came by the house to fix the wire.  We were having problems in our house with lights flickering - getting more dim or getting very bright - especially when something like a hair dryer or the washing machine would kick on.  It turned out that the tension guide wire tore out the ground going into our house.  Once these guys - who were from Colorado and were helping out the local power company - got it fixed, it seemed to fix the dimming and surge problems.)

I've been in two tropical storms in my lifetime - once in Houston in 1985 and once in New Orleans in 1998.  The winds were nowhere as intense as the winds we experienced on Monday.  Many people in the Midwest who have gone through a hurricane said Monday's derecho equaled the experience they had previously.  The storm was also sort of weird.  Lots of wind, but not a lot of rain.  A lot of the rain was coming down horizontally and I'm guessing a lot of it didn't make it into our rain gauge.  Our gauge showed only .15 of an inch of rain, but the yard and soil in our garden seemed to show that there was more than that.  

And the temperature dropped significantly.  Just before the storm hit, our thermometer showed that it was 91° (F).  After the storm had gone through, the temperature stood at 63° (F).  That's a pretty strong cold front that came through.
About an hour after the storm passed, I was able to get outside as I felt the winds had died down enough for me to survey the damage.  Quite frankly, other than a few bigger limbs that were pretty easy to drag to the curb, we didn't have much other than a bunch of leaves and twigs in our yard.  It took my wife and I about 30 to 45 minutes of total clean up.  And what we didn't get picked up, I figured that I'd our vacuum/mow the lawn to pick up the rest of it.   I picked up tree branches with leaves from five different types of trees on our front yard - none of them from either our linden tree or the crab apple tree.  In fact, both the trees on our property came through with flying colors and little to no damage.  Our other neighbors around us seemed to be as lucky as we were.  We did have some trees down in the neighborhood including just down the block to the west of us.  We know a guy just down the street from us who had a tree snap off at ground level that landed on his front yard.  Except, it originally stood between the sidewalk and the street.  "Not my problem," he said with a shrug when we saw him later on.  "The city will take care of it."  Most of the yard debris around our immediate neighborhood consisted of leaves, small branches and some naked twigs.  

We can't say that for a handful of trees in our full neighborhood.  My wife and I ventured out - as authorities said not to do after the storm - to survey areas in the blocks surrounding our home.  Friends behind us lost some of their fencing.  The neighbors next door had their garage door pushed in by the wind and knocked off the track, but they were able to open it up manually.  A neighbor about a half block away had a smaller tree come down on his garage.  But the tree was in such bad shape that it literally exploded when it hit the roof and the damage to his house was minimal.  A neighbor to the north had a large tree come down on their above ground pool and part of their house.  We saw a lot of tree damage, but not a lot of damage to dwellings.  Of course, no one had power.

We figured that if we didn't open the doors on our two refrigerators, we could probably get by with not worrying about the food inside the fridge for about 18 hours and up to 48 hours with the freezer.  Ice was nowhere to be found - at least when we finally thought about it and the few grocery stores/convenience stores that were open had already been stripped bare by people who had similar ideas, but were much more quick at the switch.  I laid in bed that night in a house with no electricity - which meant no air-conditioning or even fans - worrying about the food.

The next morning, something woke me up around 6 a.m.  It was the hum of a small motor.  My wife had moved to our spare bedroom as she was having trouble sleeping and it woke her up, too.  I threw on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and went to look out our front door.  Our next door neighbor had his industrial-sized generator - a 5000-watt loud-assed beauty that he started up moments before.  It was a beautiful morning and I went outside to take a look at the yard after we had cleaned it up the day before.  

I saw that he had two drop cords plugged into the generator - no doubt from their house refrigerator and their garage refrigerator.  They had a phone charger plugged into the third outlet and the fourth outlet was empty.  He also had a high-voltage input for air conditioners or ovens, but I doubt if he would use that as the weather had turned very nice with low humidity after the storm.

My neighbor came around the corner of his garage and he said, "Hey, if you have a drop cord that will reach, you can plug your refrigerator in your garage into the generator."  Well, he didn't have to offer twice.  I mean, we're talking about the infamous "beer fridge" that also is our main freezer.  I grabbed a 100-foot extension cord and ran it out from the garage to the generator.  He plugged it into the generator and I plugged in the power cord from the fridge into the extension cord.  The refrigerator jumped to life.  

My wife groggily came out into the kitchen when I got back into the house.  "How rude," she said half-jokingly about the sound of the generator next door.  

I said, "Well, that rude sound is saving our food and beer in the garage."  

She said, "Can he do the one in the house?"

I walked back outside and he came up to me and said, "Hey, when we're done charging our phones, I'll have another outlet open.  If you have another drop cord, we can hook up your house fridge."  I had to connect a 50 footer and a 25 footer together to make it work, but when he plugged it into the generator, our house fridge popped on effortlessly.  

With that worry out of the way for awhile, we started to reach out to family members.  The only problem was that cellular service was so sporadic - I understand that one-third of all cell towers across the state of Iowa were damaged in the storm - and calls and texts didn't make it to their intended targets.  I had sent a text to a couple three people at my work saying that we had no power, no internet, and "iffy" cellular coverage and that I would have no way to work at home that day.  My wife - who has been working from home since April - was pretty much in the same boat.  

It turned out that her uncle - her dad's brother - and her son were going to go out to her dad's farm and help cut up the tree that killed his car.  We started to get stuff together to head up there and we took off around 11 a.m.  About 30 miles outside of Davenport on our way to his farm, my wife got a text message from her son. "Ohp!  Change of plans," she said.  The text from her son said that they were pretty much done out at the farm and were heading into Cedar Rapids to help clear debris from her sister's yard.  "We're going to Cedar Rapids now," she said as more of a command than a statement.  

When we got near Cedar Rapids we began to see the scope of the damage.  Between the Cedar Rapids airport exit and the U.S. Highway 30 exit, we counted 7 semi's that were on their sides, blown over from the high winds the day before.  It was quite the sight.  

Getting into Cedar Rapids, we were astonished and horrified at the amount of tree damage suffered in the city.  Trees had been uprooted, large branches were laying on roadways, trunks of tree were twisted and shorn of bark, and power lines were hanging dangerously along sidewalks and low over roadways.  I had never seen so much damage to trees that didn't involve a tornado in my life.

My wife's sister lives just west of downtown Cedar Rapids and we turned down her street and were horrified at what we saw.  The amount of destruction was amazing.  It was certainly astonishing to see.  Wind gusts in the area around the city climbed to 112 mph - good enough for what would be classified as a Category 3 hurricane. 

My wife's dad was "supervising" his brother and Cindy's son as they used chain saws to cut up the larger tree that had fallen on my sister-in-law's yard.  It turned out I was a much needed extra hand to help move some of the larger chunks of wood to the side of the yard near the street.  My wife, my sister-in-law, and their cousin from the Twin Cities who came down from NE Iowa with my wife's uncle and aunt to help out all grabbed rakes to take care of the leaves and small branches in the yard.  

It was a beautiful day - much nicer than the day before at the same time of the storm was slamming into Cedar Rapids.  We actually made pretty short work of most of the debris in her yard - I think it took us a little less than two hours to get much of the debris close to the street.  My father-in-law was concerned that we were covering the sidewalk in some places and I had to assure him that the city of Cedar Rapids probably viewed this episode as a special situation and would probably waive any considerations of citing my sister-in-law for having debris on her sidewalk.  In fact, my wife pointed out other neighbors up and down the street that had debris on the sidewalks in front of their homes to my father-in-law.  "Don't worry, Dad," she assured him. "She's not going to get a ticket from the city on this one."   

Next to my sister-in-law's house was a large tree that had slammed into the garage in back.  If you click on the photo on the above right, you may be able to see a light grey vehicle that was parked in the garage.  It turned out that the former family had outgrown the house and moved to a larger property.  The father of the lady who lived there had his Chevrolet Traverse stored in there.  When the property was sold to a young lady, the man who stored the Traverse in the garage came up with a proposition to the new owner - allow me to continue to store my Traverse in the garage and I'll mow your lawn for you at no charge.  The new owner was like, "Well, duh!  Yeah!"  

After I was told that story by my sister-in-law, I said, "Well, how did that work out for him?!"  It was going to be interesting how they were going to get the tree off the garage and the Equinox extracted from the garage without it collapsing on top of the vehicle.  

(UPDATE - It turned out that more of the garage collapsed on the Traverse and it was declared as totaled by the insurance company.  The man told my sister-in-law that it only had 8000 miles on it.  Not only was his vehicle crushed, but the man was emotionally crushed that he lost his Traverse.)  

We took off to go back home a bit after 3 p.m. and the interstate out of Cedar Rapids was a rush-hour mess with cars and trucks only able to go about 20 mph out of town due to the number of overturned trucks still on the side of the road.  My wife suggested taking the airport exit and making our way east, then south to get to Interstate 80 near Iowa City.  Along the way, we were amazed by the number of cornfields where the corn stalks were just flattened.  It is estimated that 10 million acres of farmland was heavily damaged across the state and that corn yields this year will be half of what was expected.  

In fact, the damage to cornfields was so severe that you could see it from space.  The wispy white blotches you see from west central Iowa into the eastern part of the state are cornfields that were blown over during the derecho.  

We got back home around 5 p.m. and our power was still not on.  Behind our neighbor's house is the large transformer that serves a number of houses in the area.  A large branch had fallen from our neighbor's maple tree onto the main wire near the transformer during the storm and there had been repeated attempts to contact MidAmerican Energy to tell them about the branch.  Between four or five neighbors in the area, we hoped that at least one of us was able to circumnavigate the website on our phones that continued to have sporadic service as the toll free number to report outages was busy every time one of us would call.  I figured that as long as that branch was up there, we wouldn't have power.  

At the height of the outage, over 111,000 customers in the greater Quad Cities area were without power.  I was able to finally get through via phone on Tuesday night to MidAmerican and an automated message said that there were still over 25,000 outages on the Iowa side of the river including over 1500 in our immediate area. But it never did allow me to let them know that we had a limb on the main line behind our neighbor's house.  

To give you a perspective of what it looked like a night after the storm, the above photos are a before and after satellite view of central and eastern Iowa (the Quad Cities are just out of the frame on the right) showing the widespread power outages suffered across the state.  When the August 11 picture was taken, you can see that Cedar Rapids was nearly all dark.  And while Des Moines appeared to be well lit, they still had over 70,000 customers without power.  (Photo courtesy KCRG/NASA Worldview)  

The one saving grace through all of this - we had water.  And we have a gas water heater.  After working hard moving debris in Cedar Rapids earlier in the day, a long, hot shower felt damned good just before we went to bed.  Plus it helped keep us cool on another night of no air conditioning or even being able to use a fan to blow some air around.  

Later that evening, something woke me up.  Lights had come back on in our house!  The television in the bedroom was recycling through the DirecTV box startup menu.  I looked at the clock and it said 10:57.  I sort of tapped my wife on the leg and I said, "Power!"  She threw the covers over her head and didn't move a muscle.  That was her way of telling me, "You deal with it!"  

I got out of bed, threw on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and proceeded to try to get things back to normal.  That included turning off lights, resetting clocks, turning off the TV on our four-season porch, and - most importantly - plugging our refrigerators back into the wall.  Our neighbor had shut off the generator earlier in the evening because I'm sure the neighborhood wouldn't want to hear that thing going all night long.  I got the fridge in the kitchen plugged back in and went out to the garage and got that one plugged back in.  I gathered up our drop cords that were outside and took them into the garage.  

Then I went into the office to check my computer.  That's when I discovered the internet was working fine and dandy in conjunction with the power coming back on.  And I had a bunch of e-mails that I knew I would need to return first thing in the morning.  But the first thing I did was go to the MidAmerican Energy web site and report the branch on the power line.  I guess that having a large branch on the line like that doesn't matter.  

But the best thing is that I also had to shut all our open windows as the air-conditioner and ceiling fans were also working.  After being up for about 45 minutes trying to get everything back to normal in the house, I crawled back into bed listening to the hum of our HVAC unit outside our bedroom window.  My wife was more than happy that the AC was back on.  

As I finish this up entry on Thursday evening - three-plus days after the derecho hit - there are still over 25,000 houses and businesses across the Quad Cities that still do not have power.  In highly affected places like Des Moines, Newton, Marshalltown and Cedar Rapids, they may not have power until this weekend, at the earliest.  There are a number of rural customers who may not have power until early next week.  But we were certainly lucky.  We had helping neighbors with a generator, we had minimal damage to trees and personal property at our place, and we have power when many others do not.  

But the hell of it is - the large tree branch is still on the main power line behind our neighbor's house...

(UPDATE - A tree company working in conjunction with Mid-American Energy was able to get the branch down about five days after the storm hit.  Turned out that it didn't matter if a tree branch was on the line for power to continue on to houses in our neighborhood.)

(UPDATE 8-29-20) Since we had power less than two days after the storm hit and my sister-in-law in Cedar Rapids did not, we invited her to stay with us for a few days.  She also works from home and needs an internet connection - which wasn't going to happen until well after she got power back on.  Those few days have stretched into two weeks.  She got power back on in her house a little over a week ago, but there's still no internet connection from her cable company.  She said that she would hear from the cable company when they would be working in her neighborhood, but would not know for sure if her internet would be up and running until she went back to try it.  But it turns out that the extensive damage in Cedar Rapids could cause cable and internet access to be delayed a little longer than expected.  But we're fine with her here.  We now have three people working out of the house and no one seems to be getting in each other's way.

My sister-in-law went home to Cedar Rapids on Friday night to hang for a couple days and she told my wife on Saturday morning that she was depressed because it's been nearly 3 weeks since the storm and she still has piles upon piles of debris from the fallen trees in front of her house.)    

La Herradura - Le Claire, IA

At the little neighborhood bar that we like to go to from time to time, one of the bartenders lives out in Le Claire, just up the Mississippi River from the Quad Cities.  Just before the pandemic caused bars and restaurants to close down across the state of Iowa, she was telling us of a new Mexican restaurant in Le Claire that had just opened up.  She said the food was delicious.  Recently, my wife and I made our way out to Le Claire for a Saturday afternoon getaway and we ended up at La Herradura for a late lunch.   

For years, I've said that we're very blessed to have a number of very good Mexican restaurants in the Quad Cities area.  Since the 1920's migrant workers from Mexico came to the area to work on the railroad and in farm fields in the valley along the Mississippi River.  And many of them stayed in places like East Moline, Silvis and Muscatine.  There are easily a dozen great - and authentic - Mexican restaurants between Muscatine and the Quad Cities.  So when we found out that one was opening in Le Claire - and it was reportedly very good - we were eager to give it a try.  

The owners of La Herradura had hoped to open sometime in February of this year, but like any new venture there were some delays involved.  They finally opened on March 2, but were forced to close two weeks later when Iowa shut down all bars and restaurants because of the COVID-19 pandemic.  La Herradura reopened for to-go food orders in April and re-opened for inside dining earlier this summer.  

After an afternoon of visiting a couple three local watering holes in Le Claire, I turned the car north along Cody Road and found La Herradura just north of the downtown area.  (see map)  The building that houses La Herradura was once a small grocery store before it closed down.  A restaurant by the name of Tasty Cafe took over part of the space of the old grocery store, but it was replaced by a place called Destyni's Cafe.  That restaurant was in the spot until last fall when it closed down.  Hopefully, La Herradura breaks that streak of restaurants in that location going out of business.

La Herradura is named after the wonderful Herradura tequila which my wife and I prefer for our homemade margaritas.  La Herradura has a wide open floor plan with tables in the middle of the room and booths ringing the perimeter.  It's brightly lit and has a number of Mexican artwork and artifacts on the walls.  There's also a small outdoor seating area in front of the building.   

We sat down in a booth by one of the front windows and were given menus to look over.  La Herradura doesn't have a bar, per se, but a small shelving unit near the kitchen window on which to make drinks.  They had margaritas, sangria and wine, as well as a number of domestic and imported beers to choose from.  

Their signature margarita is made with, of course, Herradura tequila.  We had a choice of either the Herradura reposado or the silver.  We got the silver for these margaritas.  The Herradura is mixed with Cointreau, orange and lime juices.  It was served in a huge glass and it cost $14 per drink.  Now, at this point in the afternoon, we weren't certain that we needed a margarita, let alone a $14 margarita.  But it was very smooth, refreshing and flavorful.

We started off getting a basket of their house-made chips and salsa.  The salsa was sweet and tangy, and had a very good flavor.  I asked our server if I could get some of the salsa verde to go with the chips.  She brought over a bowl of their salsa verde and it was served warm.  Most salsa verdes that we've had are usually a little too salty for our tastes, but the salsa verde at La Herradura wasn't salty at all.  There was a hint of saltiness, but nothing really noticeable.  The salsa verde was excellent, in my book.

Most of the food items on the menu were your typical Mexican fare - tacos, enchiladas, burritos, and combo plates.  But they also had a number of seafood items on the menu including grilled tilapia tacos, a handful of shrimp dishes, and both shrimp and fish ceviche.  I was really keen on the seafood items on the menu, but I also had my eye on the pork chile verde dish, as well as the carnitas platter.  In fact, they had about six or seven items on the menu that I was really interested in.  

My wife thought the fajitas sounded good to her and she ordered up the chicken fajitas.  Since it was still a bit before 3 p.m. when we ordered, she was still able to get the fajitas in the lower priced lunch-sized platter. The fajitas were served with grilled onions and peppers along with a side of shredded lettuce and pico de gallo.  Mexican rice and refried beans came with the grilled chicken and veggies.  Flour shell tacos completed her meal.  

Torn between too many choices that sounded good to me on the menu, I ended up ordering the beef enchiladas verde.  But the carnitas also sounded good to me and I asked if I could get a single carnitas taco.  Normally, you would get three enchiladas on the platter, but the lunch portion only served two.  And that was fine with me.  Refried beans and rice came with the enchiladas.  

The beef enchilada verde was very good.  Once again, the chile verde sauce was not salty and had a wonderful natural taste that went well with the enchiladas.  The rice was also good and the refried beans were decent.  But, then again, refried beans are not my favorite thing in a Mexican restaurant.  

The carnitas taco was topped with chihuahua cheese, pico de gallo and a slice of avocado.  The carnitas were simmered, then grilled for a crunchy taste.  I poured a bit of the salsa verde on top of the taco to give it a bit more of a pizazz in taste, although it really didn't need it.  

My wife was sort of disappointed in her chicken fajitas, however.  She said they were too salty.  She offered me a bite and I got some on my fork to try.  And they were very salty.  My wife is the salt eater in the family and if she says something is too salty, well, it's very salty to me.  She thought the overall taste of her chicken would have been much better had it not been so salty.  

My wife's disappointment aside, we decided that we would come back to La Herradura at some point because they had so many things on their menu that we really wanted to try. We probably went a little overboard ordering up a couple of their signature margaritas - we decided that would could have shared one - but they were outstanding in taste and quality.  I especially enjoyed my beef enchilada verde and the single carnitas taco that I got was also very good.  Other than my wife's chicken fajitas being too salty, she seemed to like the place very much.  It was comfortable and the service was prompt and friendly.  Compared to other noteworthy Mexican restaurants in the area, I felt that La Herradura held their own.  We figured we could go back to La Herradura a number of times and try something new on each visit, the menu was just that interesting to us.