We invite to you experience and explore the world-famous “Med-City” aboard one of our vintage red trolleys. Our current public trolley tour, the Rochester City & Mayo Historical Trolley Tour, will introduce you to Rochester’s many hidden scenic, cultural, and historical gems, as you experience the homes and lives of pioneering doctors associated with the early years of Mayo Clinic. In addition, this 90 minute narrated public trolley tour gives you the opportunity to hop-on and hop-off the trolley at Rochester’s top sights and attractions.

If you wish to see more of this beautiful region, you can visit Amish farms, historic river towns, subterranean caverns, Laura Ingalls Wilder historic sites, and the scenic beauty of the Upper Mississippi River Valley, which features the National Eagle Center and is rated one of the most scenic drives in America. While visiting Rochester, the metropolitan sophistication of the Twin Cities is always only just over an hour away!

“It is strange how little has been written about the Upper Mississippi. The river below St. Louis has been described time and again, and it is the least interesting part…. Along the Upper Mississippi every hour brings something new. There are crowds of odd islands, bluffs, prairies, hills, woods and villages — everything one could desire to amuse oneself. Few people ever think of going there, however…. as we form our opinions of our country from what other people say of us, of course we ignore the finest part of the Mississippi.”

— Mark Twain, in an interview in the Chicago Tribune, July 9, 1886

“More dramatic elsewhere, perhaps, more strange, more thrilling, more grand, too; but nothing that picks you up in its arms and gently almost lovingly cradles you as do these southwestern Wisconsin hills.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright, famous architect who designed three residential homes in Rochester

“I’ve had a chance to see some wonderful country along the Mississippi where they used to drive the logs in the old lumbering days and the trails where the pioneers came north. Saw some good bass jump in the river. I never knew anything about the upper Mississippi before and it is really a very beautiful country with plenty of pheasants and ducks in the fall.”

— Ernest Hemingway, in a letter written while staying in Rochester in 1961

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

That’s my Middle West — not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters….

— by novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing about traveling home in winter to the Middle West and St. Paul during his college days

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

— by James Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and visiting professor, University of Minnesota, late 1950s