Lake Itasca

We (and a small horde of other tourists) watched the Mississippi River flow out of Lake Itasca and wind its way down towards Bemidji, as it started its long journey to the Gulf of Mexico where it will mix with crude oil to create a chemically and politically complex soup.

I doubt my family appreciates physical geography and plumbing quite the way I do, so the fact that we started Day 4 in the Red River watershed (Hudson Bay), spent the middle of the day at the headwaters of the Mississippi (Gulf of Mexico), and ended the day in the Great Lakes (the Saint Lawrence and the Atlantic), probably didn't occur to them as sort of cool!