Spring training has started, so it’s time to schedule your ballpark road trips! If you love baseball, but don’t relish the idea of spending your free time buying tickets, researching hotels and driving between stadiums, you can outsource all that to the experts at Ballpark Road Trips. The company offers three different trips that start in the Midwest (Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Louis) and take you all over the country. You can literally just sit back and enjoy the ride. Ball

It’s prime pumpkin patch time, people! Here are five of the best North Dakota pumpkin patches and corn mazes to get your fall fix. You’ll find family friendly spots for a little corn maze/pumpkin picking/hay ride magic. Or you could zoom over the crowd on a zipline or load a pumpkin into a sinister looking weapon and launch it across a field. (Hey, it takes all kinds…) Whichever options you choose, be sure to visit sooner rather than later. Pumpkin patches are seasonal and we

Staring up into the thick, velvet night, with the monolith of Bear Lodge at my back, I realize that the sky isn’t black at all, but a marbled expanse of slate and jet, charcoal and gray, sprinkled with glittering stars. The Black Hills slumber hard and deep. I know the names of many of the constellations that suddenly seem to burn close and impossibly bright. But I know them in Greek. I have no knowledge of the star stories from the people who have lived here for thousands of

Dutifully reading about local history? Been there, done that. I like my museums a little more immersive, thanks. Seeing a city from a giant praying mantis, a Ferris Wheel or a boat marooned on a rooftop in a place where you can run and jump and make as much noise as you want? Now we’re talking. Sign me up. If you think that museums are quiet places where you can look, but can’t touch, think again. These five Midwestern museums encourage you dive in (often physically) and use

European explorers came north to Minnesota to learn what the indigenous people of the Northwoods had known for thousands of years — that the source of the Misi-ziibi (the great river of life in Ojibwe) is a glacial lake in the northwoods of Minnesota. The mighty Mississippi (as it’s now known), starts as a trickle in Itasca State Park, before continuing its winding route 2,552 miles south to the Gulf of Mexico. The park’s 33,235 acres of lakes, forests, and historic markers (