The North American Bear Center in Ely, Minnesota is an ursine Eden, two and a half acres full of everything that black bears like. They’ve trees to climb, clover to loll on, and a pond to go sploosh in. There are bunchberries, chokecherries, and hazelnuts, and plenty more exotic snacks doled out by the caretakers. There are even other bears. To see the bear getting along exactly how it would most like to, you couldn’t visit any place better.
Mission Manor
Escape rooms are phenomenal. In one, you are asked to believe you’re in a scenario which requires that you solve a series of intricate puzzles in order to leave within the allotted time. You scurry around like a dog at a deli, looking for anything that seems remotely interesting and straining to see how it fits into the bigger picture. It’s like a real life video game.
Stagestop Saloon & Grill
Opening up an entirely new restaurant is hard enough. Taking over a beloved institution, on the other hand, while keeping what made it unique and improving on it — that’s just heroic. Fortunately Stagestop Saloon & Grill’s new owner Luke Clausen is just the man for the job.
Blue Sun Soda Shop
Mark Lazarchic is a serial entrepreneur. He owns Renaissance Fireworks, the pop-up tents of which manifest themselves in every other parking lot throughout the Twin Cities by about late June. He makes his biggest killing in wedding sparklers, as his company Wedding Day Sparklers is the country’s greatest provider of them. His Blue Sun Soda Shop in Spring Lake Park is decidedly not one of his more lucrative endeavors. “It doesn’t make any money because I keep investing in new $#!&,” explained Mark. “But if you’re doing something just for the money…well, then you should just get a job.”
RENT
Conservatives in the literary world may claim to prefer their plays unadulterated, but without the occasional update to a classic work we would be missing so much. One would shudder to imagine theater without West Side Story, an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, and we’d all be much poorer off without The Muppet Christmas Carol. Rent, an adaptation of Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme by Jonathan Larson, is in that same boat, and it’s one of the glowingest examples of how setting a classic in the modern era can so greatly improve upon it. (Let’s keep Madama Butterfly intact forever, though.)
Sheyenne River Retrievers
“Whatever you think makes a dog good is entirely up to you,” said Jason Helgeson of Sheyenne River Retrievers. “We make sure our pups will be the best fit for anyone’s definition of a good dog, whether that means they’ll be working, hunting, or just part of the family.