La Crosse gets our nod as the most attractive and inviting town or city we’ve visited so far on our voyage up the Mississippi. The place is just plain pretty, and it possesses the sort of friendly, wholesome all-American atmosphere that makes you feel like you’d enjoy living there.
The Queen docked at lovely, leafy Riverside Park – the city’s showpiece riverfront park – and a picture-perfect setting on this brisk October morning with the fall colors out in force.
We joined our Riverlorian/guide JoAnn Funk (a La Crosse native) for a stroll through the park and adjacent International Friendship Gardens, a network of demonstration gardens that celebrate sister-city relationships between La Crosse and several international cities. Most impressive of them, in my opinion, is the Chinese garden, with its water elements and traditional moon gate entrance.
It’s an easy walk from the park into the historic downtown shopping area, where a great number of 19th century buildings have been preserved and restored. Lumbering brought great prosperity to La Crosse from the mid to late 1800s and the fine commercial buildings here, coupled with the grand Victorian mansions lining residential streets, are a legacy of the city’s lumber barons.
Wanting to see more of the city, we joined ACL’s included bus tour – a two-hour excursion that was informatively narrated by a visitors bureau volunteer – whose real job is director of the city’s public library. We got the inside story on everything worth knowing about La Crosse and glimpses of most of the old lumber baron mansions – one of which we were able to tour. The 1858 Hixon House offers a beautiful look back in time at a Victorian home of the era, authentically furnished just as it was during the Hixon family’s residency.
