The original plan for today was to spend much of the day driving parts of the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway in Minneapolis and then drive to Brainerd, MN. This byway is a connected set of parkways that mainly run alongside the Mississippi and around the chain of lakes in the city. I started off driving the W. River Parkway south to Minnehaha Falls and soon discovered that you could not see much from the parkway itself and it just connected the parks from which you could see the sights. I stopped at the falls and enjoyed a short walk to the upper and lower viewing areas.

Even though yesterday’s camera repair had been pretty successful I did not have full confidence in it’s reliability and decided to stop at a good camera shop to see if they knew of a suitable replacement. I want to make sure I can capture Alaska. Even though I had failed to identify a suitable compact camera with GPS when searching on the Internet, the expert at the shop immediately came up with a Sony camera that met my needs and has many more features than my old one. Everything looked good and then she showed me the pop-up electronic viewfinder and I was sold. One of the issues I’ve always  had with compact cameras is not being able to clearly see the LCD screen in bright sunshine – not any more 🙂

Since the parkways did not seem to offer great scenery I decided to skip the rest of the sightseeing in order to go and set up the camera and learn about its functions. I am working on that now but already discovered that Amazon’s price is just two dollars less than I paid.

The somewhat boring map/video is here.

The view of Minnehaha Falls from the topand bottom – you can get an idea of the height from the person on the bridge.