Travel MN European Style
There are 650 hostels in former West Germany. Minnesota has only three. The best of those, and likely the best hostel in the Midwest, is the Mississippi Headwaters Hostel nestled in the heart of Itasca State Park. Tom Cooper, who has managed Mississippi Headwaters Hostel during the last decade, thinks the spic-and-span hostel, located just 400 feet from the parks busy bike and boat rental concession, is one of the best kept – and most economical – travel secrets in Minnesota.
Some days he’d like to keep it that way. Those are the days when he takes a long ski or hike through the pristine forest at Itasca and then comes home to a crackling fire in one of the hostels 80 year old stone fireplaces. But Tom’s job is to promote the 31 bunk Headwaters Hostel and to keep it financially above water. “Our biggest problem is that hostels aren’t well understood in this part of the country,” Tom, who discovered hostels while traveling in Europe, says. “We get calls from people who ask us if we have running water and indoor toilets.”
Mississippi Headwaters Hostel doesn’t just have running water and indoor toilets. It has a spotlessly clean men’s toilet and shower. It has an immaculate women’s toilet and shower. And the porcelain in the handicapped accessible loo sparkles. In each of these the water runs amply; both hot and cold. Then there’s the bright and fully equipped kitchen with two electric ranges, two microwave ovens, plenty of counter space for meal preparation, and multiple sinks for food preparation and dish washing.
“I just don’ get it,” Tom says. “People will go to Douglas Lodge (the state owned park lodge) and it will be full. The people at Douglas Lodge will tell them about us and they won’t even check us out. Maybe they don’t like cooking for themselves.” Maybe they don’t. But lots of other people do enjoy cooking in the hostel kitchen. And family groups love the dining area with its old maple floors, log beams, stone fire place, and nice view towards Lake Itasca. Besides, guests can stay at the hostel and take their meals at Douglas Lodge.
Sometimes family groups will rent the entire 18 bunk south wing of the hostel. There, for between $252 to $288 per night, they’ll find a congenial sitting room with skylights, three small dorm rooms with the hostels solidly made Vermont maple bunk beds and, well, more spotless bath rooms. You can see the entire floor plan for the hostel, which was built in 1924 as Itasca Park’s first head quarters and has been envisioned as an hostel by park management since 1980, at the hostel’s website.
Beyond the sitting room and bunks of the south wing is a game room. But, unless it’s raining most visitors want to be out canoeing, hiking, swimming, biking, skiing, snow shoeing, or just soaking up the magnificence of Minnesota’s oldest state park. The game room also is often used as a dining room. As are the picnic tables around the fire ring just out side the hostel. Large groups often rent the entire hostel, according to Tom.
Although most of the Headwater Hostel visitors tend to be family groups in the summer and ski groups in the winter, the hostel nicely accommodates couples or individuals. The dorm rooms have six bunks but there are smaller rooms of four and five bunks. A recent visitor said, “The last time my wife and I stayed at the hostel we had one of the smaller rooms, the Antonia DeMichiel room, all to ourselves. Actually, on a crystal blue January week day, we had the entire hostel to ourselves. Truthfully, we had Itasca Park’s tens thousands of acres largely to ourselves.”
But part of the fun of hostels is meeting interesting people and generally opportunities abound. Since the Mississippi Headwaters Hostel is part of an international network some of the interesting people you might meet over coffee or dish washing in the kitchen will find it difficult to talk to you. A frequent visitor states, “I once met a Russian mother and her daughter who were traveling around the world together. There was also a couple of young Finnish girls. Just last weekend Tom had visitors from Australia.”
The Hostel Tradition
Hostels kind of belong to the people who use them. And there are the hostel customs. “At hostels we operate under the belief that you are responsible for yourself,” Tom says. That means if you make a mess in the kitchen you clean it up. You wash your own dishes. Wipe down the tables. And when you leave it would be nice if you would vacuum your room. The idea is you leave the place as clean as you found it. Believe it or not, family groups can enjoy the industry of mopping down and drying the dining room floor after they’ve used it for a long week end.
After a traveler leaves Mississippi Headwaters Hostel they can visit some of the over 200 other hostels in the US. In Minnesota there’s one on an island near the Boundary Waters Wilderness. Just over the border, in South Dakota, there’s one in a renovated barn in a wooded valley. In California there’s a couple in light houses perched on cliffs hovering over the Pacific’s surf. In New Mexico there’s one in an old desert ranch and one with hot springs along the Rio Grande. In El Paso there’s one in an funky old hotel with an elegant lobby and another like that in New Orleans. Some of these places actually have a toll free reservation line run the largest association of hostels in the U.S., Hostelling International.
Like Mississippi Headwaters Hostel, most hostels are in some sort of historic building. The hostel will likely also be in a spectacular setting. Mississippi Headwaters, which is managed by the non-profit MinnesotaCouncil of Hostelling International, has both the spectacular and the historic. “When is the last time you talked about the history of a chain motel out on the highway,” Tom, sipping his coffee in the dining room, asks a visitor. But then not many chain hotels are on the National Register of Historic Places. Headwaters Hostel is.