Minnesota
From the 50 state
visitor guide :
Minn. Stat. 2019 §243.166
Registration Triggers and Deadlines:
5 days for initial
registration and updates.
Visitors: Presence in state for more than 14 days or
30 days per calendar year triggers obligation to register. §243.166(1b).
Registrants without a primary address register within 24 hours of entering new
jurisdiction, & provide updates in-person weekly.
Residency/Presence and Other Restrictions:
None. Only Level 3
offenders are placed on the public website. (per NARSOL Digest, June 2018, p.7)
Duration & updates:
10 yrs – life. Updates annually (weekly for those without permanent residence). §243.166.
Most recent visit: June-July 2025
For registered visitors, Minnesota is one of the easier states to get along with. Fourteen consecutive days should be enough for most visits. If for some reason you do end up on the state’s registry, only Level 3 offenders are placed on the public website. Be careful, however, because Minnesota is one of seven U.S. states whose out-of-state Tier 1 (or equivalent) registration requirement ends at a specified number of years after release from prison, or at the number of years required by the offender’s state of offense – whichever is longer. So if you are thinking how to escape from your own state’s harsh registration requirements, don’t think about this state.
Duluth – In late June 2025 I took Minnesota up on its relative hospitality, at least as it applies to visitors, entering from Wisconsin at Duluth, the same place as I had four years earlier. On that previous visit I found myself stymied from seeing much of this city by a several massive construction projects all going on at once. Downtown Duluth was completely ripped up with construction, including not just the I-35 / US 2 interchange, not just most of the main streets for some kind of underground utility and streetscape reconstruction, but also a major downtown hospital expansion that has closed most of the surrounding streets. After an hour of trying I couldn’t figure out how to even get to the waterfront park, never mind find a place to park. I had to give up!
Surely by now all this must be over and I can see what’s going on, right? Well … they’re getting close, and I must say I never felt safer in my life than going over that new US 2 bridge! The downtown hospital, however, is back at it with some new project so it’s still hard to get around.
I did find the waterfront park, which is connected to Downtown Duluth by two blocks-long pedestrian decks over I-35. Nice job, actually! Duluth’s downtown is oversized for a city of its size but healthy. That’s because it’s still Duluth’s main commercial district even after all this time. Across St. Louis Bay Duluth’s twin city Superior WI has transformed their waterfront into naturalistic estuary.
This visit to Duluth/Superior was more like a reconnaissance mission, but I liked what I saw. Next time, a closer look.
Hibbing – Although my next stop was the Ojibwe Leech Lake reservation (see Ojibwe Nation blog post) I took a side trip here because my map was showing points of interest. Hibbing is a mining town and from the look of it a successful one. Having been to a couple of mining museums before I chose instead the Minnesota Discovery Center but that was a mistake – what a rinky-dink piece of crap! There are viewpoints where you can see huge open pit mines.
Bemidji – I didn’t take a close look at this town because I was too disgusted with the ugly statute of Paul Bunyan. I can’t even imagine how crappy the Count Beltrami State Monument must be!
Pelican Rapids – New streetscape and park improvements for the World’s Largest Pelican!
Fergus Falls Prairie Wetlands Learning Center – Quite beautiful and interesting. Now that I live in the prairie I should learn more about this stuff.
Granite Falls – Should be called Concrete Dam. No granite, no falls.
Minneapolis
Like the rest of Minnesota, there are no statewide restrictions for you in Minneapolis, so you can go where you need to. My first stop was Mall of America in suburban Bloomington. It’s the largest shopping mall in the US, it’s three levels of shopping paradise and includes a big internal Nickelodeon theme park. It’s interesting to me as a retired city planner, but what’s important to note here is that if this mall were located in the suburbs of Chicago (where I’d been just a week earlier) instead of Minneapolis, Nickelodeon could been considered a “public playground” and we’d all be banned from the entire mall.
While researching the Minneapolis rail transit system later that day I realized there’s a rail stop at the mall – I could’ve left my car there, done the rest of my trip my transit and picked up my car at the end of the day. Instead I drove to the Museum of Art. It’s big! Followed by a drive around Lake of the Isles. Minneapolis Sculpture Garden –Yey! Minnehaha Falls – Double Yey!
Sculpture Garden Minnehaha Falls
Then downtown to take a walk across the Mississippi on the Stone Arch Bridge, a Minneapolis must do for every tourist – but it was closed on the downtown end due to construction! Fortunately it’s still open from Hennepin Park on the other side of the river, so I got to see St. Anthony’s Falls and the great view of downtown. But Mill City Museum was closed for the day by the time I go there.
PS – Downtown Minneapolis is also “famous” (among city planners) for its overhead walkways (like the ones in the Duluth photo above), which are intended to help people get around when it’s feezin’ ass cold and there’s two feet of snow on the ground.
I will be returning
to Minneapolis – St. Paul next month to go to the Minnesota State Fair (instead
of Iowa this year), which begins the week before and runs through Labor
Day. I’m just mentioning it now so I
don’t have to do an update later.
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