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<p>Wha?! I live in Saint Paul and I ride my bike. We do have hills. A heckuva lot more hills than south central Iowa. And we have a heckuva lot more trees than Iowa, too, including numerous large, stately trees on and around the Mac campus.</p>
<p>And Grinnell’s winter weather is, IMO, not appreciably better than Saint Paul’s, and Carleton’s is virtually indistinguishable from Saint Paul’s, the two being about 40 miles apart. The challenges of Minnesota winters are wildly overblown. I had some trepidation about moving here 10 years ago because of stories I’d heard about the winters, but it turns out the stories were wildly exaggerated. Yes, it can get very cold at times, but that’s typically for 2 or 3 days at a time, twice or 3 times a year–and much of that is in January, during winter break at Macalester. It’s not as if it’s -20 months on end. Average temperatures here are not that much different from, say, Middlebury, VT, or Hanover, NH, which coastal people don’t exactly avoid because of the weather. Just a lot of overblown mythology out there.</p>