{"id":3521,"date":"2011-10-18T21:17:58","date_gmt":"2011-10-19T03:17:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/?p=3521"},"modified":"2015-10-26T09:17:15","modified_gmt":"2015-10-26T15:17:15","slug":"the-great-river-road-prairie-du-chien-to-lacrosse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/?p=3521","title":{"rendered":"The Great River Road – Prairie du Chien to LaCrosse"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a>

I’ve been driving back and forth between Mineral Point and Minnesota a lot for work recently.\u00a0 I tend to leave in the middle of the night so I don’t see much going out, but I like to take the scenic route home.\u00a0 I ended up loving the drive along the Mississippi so much, Leslie and I repeated part of the drive over the weekend–along a stretch of the Great River Road between Prairie du Chien <\/a>and LaCrosse.\u00a0 We were already fairly familar with the towns along the Mississippi from Prairie du Chien and on down.\u00a0 We have spent time in Marquette, McGregor, Guttenberg, Potosi<\/a>, Dickeyville and Dubuque.\u00a0 And I’ve spent a fair amount of time further north along the Mississippi around Redwing, but we’d never driven the 50 miles from Prairie du Chien to LaCrosse.<\/p>\n

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For the first 10\u00a0miles out of Prairie du Chien, the river is split into a dozen different channels and you only catch glimpses of the backwaters through the trees.\u00a0 Then, near Lynxville, you pass Lock and Dam No. 9 and the river opens up into Lake Winneshiek (pictured above).\u00a0 The picture hardly does the place justice.\u00a0 The two mile wide lake was flanked on either sides by limestone bluffs that shot steeply\u00a0several hundred feet above the water.\u00a0 It didn’t hurt that we were there near fall color, but to me this\u00a0is the most beautiful section of the Upper Mississippi River.<\/p>\n

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We were hoping to stop at a restaurant I had seen on an earlier drive, The Red Lion<\/a>.\u00a0 A British pub? Complete with curries?\u00a0 I was so excited.\u00a0 But, sadly, it looks like they’ve closed.\u00a0 The building was for sale.\u00a0 So we ended up stopping at a little roadside stand and picked up a Klement’s <\/a>chili dog and some fresh caught catfish.\u00a0 I’m not\u00a0usually fond of deep fried fish in general and of catfish in particular, but the fish was very fresh and\u00a0the cornmeal batter was\u00a0light and airy, like a (good) hushpuppy.<\/p>\n

We actually took this drive rather impulsively, so by the time we were done eating it was starting to get dark and we decided to turn home.\u00a0 We’re definitely planning on doing some more exploring in the area (I have no choice– working in Minnesota again on Monday).\u00a0 We’d really appreciate any suggestions you have for places to stop along the river (anything over in Iowa is of interest too).\u00a0 I have heard the Great River Road House<\/a> in DeSoto in the place to go for pizza in the area.<\/p>\n

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we ended up stopping at a little roadside stand and picked up a Klement’s chili dog and some fresh caught catfish. I’m not usually fond of deep fried fish in general and of catfish in particular, but the fish was very fresh and the cornmeal batter was light and airy, like a good hushpuppy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3523,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,8],"tags":[355,254,354,352,357,356,353,358],"class_list":["post-3521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-driftless-area-towns","category-restaurants","tag-desoto","tag-driftless-area","tag-genoa","tag-great-river-road","tag-lacrosse","tag-lynxville","tag-mississippi-river","tag-prairire-du-chien","has-featured-image"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3521"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3565,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3521\/revisions\/3565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}