On board the Steamboat Minnehaha

Dave and I celebrated our third anniversary with a cruise, concert in the park, and a picnic dinner near Lake Minnetonka. If you are in the Twin Cities with a free Wednesday night, I highly recommend this.
The Steamboat Minnehaha was built in 1906 for transportation on Lake Minnetonka. In the early 1900s, Minneapolis-St Paul had one of the best public transit systems in the country. I'm told you could get from Excelsior to Hopkins in 9 minutes--you'd be hard pressed to do that today in rush hour. Steamboats and cable cars connected all the cities. Steamboats were key for getting passengers quickly across a lake with a densely wooded shoreline that had few roads. The public transit system later died when a fella named Henry Ford and cohorts saw potential profit in selling their auto to the common Minnesotan. So, they maneuvered control of the cable cars and then went about destroying the public transit system and therefore, forcing people to buy cars. Fastforward 100 years and the Twin Cities have one of the worst public transit systems in the country. Gee thanks Henry.

When the cable cars died, steamboats did too. Roads got better and no one needed them. So, in the 1920s, the company decided to strip the steamboats, drive them out to the center of the lake, and sink them.

Fifty years later, a diver discovered the Minnehaha and hauled it up from the bottom of the lake. If you do that, it becomes property of the state of Minnesota, and the state didn't want it. There was alot of legal back and forth and volunteers and fundraisers and more legal paperwork that followed for nearly 20 years.

But today, the Minnehaha is back out and running--funded and operated completely by volunteers. We took a concert cruise that departed from the ultra-cute town of Excelsior for an hour long ride to Wayzata. There, we had a nice picnic from one of the upscale restaurants (hey, it is Wayzata) and then listened to the Big Band play in the park. An hour later, we departed from Wayzata and watched the sun set on our way back to Excelsior. It was the perfect trip length and a beautiful night.