-- Missouri. Jamesport is an Amish town in northern Missouri. People there simply distinguish between two main categories of Anabaptists, Amish and Mennonite.

We ate at a "Mennonite" café. The workers' names were all Kraemer, but some were unrelated to the others. Sounds like Goessel Schmidts or the Yoders of Yoder.

People there seem to embrace the Amish, at least as a tourist attraction. Businesses use it to their monetary advantage with crafts shops, restaurants and the like. But, it's a decidedly different kind of friendly tourist trap. We didn't feel like we were being hustled, just accommodated.

On our way back through Missouri about two weeks later, we stopped at Hannibal, boyhood home of Mark Twain. As an American literature teacher, I had to check it out.

The setup was pretty cool. The whole town tries to capitalize on Twain, and I think he would find that humorous. The museum complex includes his boyhood home and homes of real-life people who served as inspiration for some of his most famous characters.

There is a killer buffet downtown that includes frog legs. I jumped at the chance to try them. They tasted like a cross between chicken and shrimp.

Hannibal also offers a nice view of the Mississippi if you cross the large dike that surrounds the town.

-- Iowa. The first stop was the area that boasts the bridges of Madison County. I was sleeping, and my wife was driving when she suddenly put on the brakes and pulled off the interstate.

Since I had been dozing, I wasn't in the best of moods. My thinking was, "You've seen one bridge, you've seen them all." But we did gaze at several and got to drive through one of them near the town of Winterset.

The burg also claims to be John Wayne's birthplace. Visitors can view his boyhood home and look over a van with $60,000 worth of murals painted on it. The van also has a pair of swinging saloon doors inside. There's something you don't see every day.

In Mason City, a town of about 23,000 friendly people, we stopped for lunch. Mason City is the birthplace of Meredith Wilson, who wrote "The Music Man."

There is a huge town square with more than its fair share of music stores per capita and a mall in the middle of town that is not surrounded by a large parking lot. That alone gives it a unique look.

The city apparently was the basis of the fictional River City of the musical. In addition, Frank Lloyd Wright had a prairie design school nearby, so a couple of buildings were designed by the famous architect, including one house and a downtown hotel.

-- Minnesota. Our first stop was Austin, the quaint home of the SPAM museum. The name of the canned product is a shortened version of "spiced meat," not "Some People are Missing," as former Free Press writer Tom Stoppel claims.

The people of Austin are extremely proud of Hormel (the locals insist the name was pronounced like normal) and SPAM, and they seem to be unaware that the town smells like pigs. There is a slaughtering plant right across the street. The museum workers said, "What smell?" when asked by visitors what the peculiar odor hanging in the air was.

The museum has embraced the Monty Python musical "Spamalot," even though it might make fun of the product. Hey, publicity is publicity, right?

Minnesota farms are beautiful, and the towns are clean. There are many tall trees, none of which seem to be Siberian elms. The first Lutherans to the area must have been smarter in that regard than our founding Mennonites.

Anyhow, the trees create oases jutting out from the surrounding corn fields. Gas stations promote the local crops by advertising the sale of E85, which is 85 percent ethanol.

Minneapolis is a town of cultural contrasts. I asked a young woman from Somalia why there are so many different peoples represented; she just shrugged and said she came from California. Interestingly, we saw some Hispanic workers in a grocery store that were Vietnamese.

We ate lunch at The Black Forest Inn, an authentic German restaurant on "eat street." The food was very good, and the waitress was helpful to the tune of a 20 percent tip.

She sent us downtown to see the famous cherry on a spoon sculpture at the art museum. Then we went to a long, stone-arch walking bridge over the Mississippi River. It was a bit hard to find, but it was worth the hassle.

We, of course, stopped at the famous Mall of America, Minnesota's No. 1 tourist attraction. By the way, the SPAM museum in Austin is No. 3. Nobody seemed to know what No. 2 is.

MOA is really just a big mall with an amusement park in the middle. I actually thought it would be larger. It's basically three stories of shops with a movie theater on the fourth floor.

Many people walk around all day in flip flops, though we struggled with sore feet, despite our quality shoes. We spent 111⁄2 hours inside that city in a city. That time included a movie and two meals. We also visited a full-blown aquarium in the basement where we were allowed to touch a shark and a stingray.

In Northern Minnesota, we ate a picnic lunch in the town of Askov, which is pronounced like what you do when you want to take a vacation. A Scandinavian town with streets named after great Danes such Hans Christian Andersen (not the dog, the author), is the start of wild-rice country.

We reached our northern-most destination, Duluth, and, unfortunately, the temperature was nearly as warm as it was at home. One day, the mercury hit 100 degrees for the first time since the 1930s. Officially, the temperature was 95, which tied a record set in 1887. Could Al Gore be onto something? Duluth residents said even the winters have not been as severe lately.

We ate at a place called Grandma's. It's like a one-of-a-kind Applebee's, and it was extremely busy. The restaurant is located in the Canal Park area where a famous bridge lifts when ships come in or leave the Lake Superior harbor.

In Two Harbors, about 20 miles north of Duluth, we witnessed a ship, the 728-foot-long Joseph L. Block, coming in to load taconite, balls of iron ore.

A number of people were sitting around with binoculars, watching the docking of the ship. Apparently, it's a big hobby with some locals. I talked to a couple of brothers who called themselves boat geeks. One of them said he won a contest a couple of years ago to ride along on one of the ships.

We had some trouble negotiating the streets in the North Shore area. The streets of Duluth are particularly confusing. There is actually an intersection of First Avenue and First Street. I told a young lady working at the counter of Erberts and Gerberts, a sandwich shop in downtown Duluth, that the person who named the streets was an idiot.

She said at least people were not shooting each other. I didn't know the two were related.

People in the North don't know how to react to the heat. When we went down to the shore, the mercury dropped to the upper 70s. It was gorgeous, the way we expected the weather to be.

As we left, at 8:30 p.m., the temperature jumped to 92 degrees within two blocks. This lake effect is unbelievable until you experience it.

Most places we go, we tell people we are from Kansas. They invariably ask, "Why are you up here?" At Betty's Pies along the North Shore, the manager sat down at our booth and chatted with us. Then, since we were from so far away, he gave my daughter a T-shirt and us some souvenir buttons and a postcard.

It pays to talk to people.

Our cabin was a little...er...rustic, and yet it was the most expensive of the entire trip. The shower was so small, my wife and daughter had to shave their legs in the kitchenette's sink. Don't ask how (apologies to David Vogel).

We went out of our way to visit the town of Schroeder (rhymes with "motor"), a quaint little village on the north shore with one of the coolest lava beaches around.

By the way, the average temperature of the lake is 40 degrees year round. We were told a person would have about six minutes to survive if he or she were to fall in. That's why lighthouses were built. The lake is so dangerous that ship insurance companies to this day still stop offering policies after the first of November.

Since the steel business is once again alive and well and demand is high, some boats, anxious to keep the iron ore and coal moving, will continue as long as possible.

Our guide at the Split Rock State Park lighthouse said, though the cliff in front of it is between 100 and 130 feet tall, spray from winter waves powered by storms called "northeasters" will reach the top of the lighthouse.

-- The Dells, Wis. This place is crazy with a capital K. T-shirt shops are everywhere. It's like Colorado's Estes Park on steroids.

Most of the shops are dirty, or at least many of the shirt sayings are. And, they cover all the bases. On one side of a store display window, I noticed shirts with Bible verses on them. On the other side were Playboy shirts and worse. My personal favorite T-shirt: "I cut the cheese in Wisconsin."

It took us a while to find them, but there are many beautiful dairies nestled in the hills and plenty of cheese shops along the highways.

We took a trip to the House on a Rock southwest of Baraboo. People told us we had to go, but it wasn't worth the hour-plus drive. A trip down the Wisconsin River in a tour boat, however, is a must-do. Cost was about $60 for the three of us.

-- Chicago, Ill. It's the city that never...ends. This place, reportedly the third-largest metropolitan area in America, is huge.

One of my goals was to attend a Cubs game at historic Wrigley Field. We left our Glenview motel on the northern end of the city at 4 p.m. for a 7 p.m. game and thought we would be very early. We ended up taking an hour just to get to the train station. Then took about 30 minutes more to get to Wrigley.

We ate at a Taco Bell in Wriggleyville because we were too cheap to pay concession stand prices, then went into the stadium for the game.

Though ticket sales are big (more than 40,000 people were there, despite a dismal Cubs year), beer sales have to be even bigger. The cost: $5.75 per cup; yet, people were ordering beer after beer. It was interesting that no smoking was allowed in the stadium. I liked that.

After the game, I stood around near the women's restroom, waiting for my girls to take care of business. I commented to the guy next to me that the last time I saw this many dudes standing around in one place waiting for their women was at a maternity ward.

The train ride to and from the game was not as smooth as I thought it would be. Those elevated cars rocked and rolled. I was standing, so I really got shaken around. People, however, were surprisingly friendly and helpful. It must be the famous Midwest hospitality.

There is nothing worse for a male traveler than being direction-turned in a big city. I was 180 degrees off the whole time because the sun was hidden behind clouds much of our stay. North was south. It was really frustrating. I guess it happened on a turn before we arrived in the big city.

On the third day, the sun came out and my internal compass corrected itself. Since we were heading home, that was probably a good thing.

Why did we decide to take a swing up north? Simply because we had never been there. I wouldn't mind returning, but, to be honest, most of that part of the country looks pretty much like Kansas.

And, this summer, it felt a lot like Kansas, too.