August
15,
2014. The Free Press, Mankato, MN.
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Kato
a nice place to visit, but it's not that nice |
Sander Ludeman works
at a financial services office on South Riverfront Drive, not far from
the
Sibley Park entrance and next to Highway 169. So occasionally they get
people
coming off the highway and stopping in to ask directions to some
location in
Mankato.
That was the case
a couple of weeks ago when an
elderly couple stopped in.
"They wanted
directions to the hot
springs. I knew right away what they were talking about," Ludeman said.
He had to gently
break it to the couple that
all of the exotic and magical things they had read bout Mankato on a
website
were pure rubbish.
The vacationing
couple had fallen prey to a
long running fake website — called “Mankato, MN: The Official City-Mankato.US Home Page
(city-mankato.us) — that was built in 1996 by Don Descy, an
educational studies professor at Minnesota State University, to teach
his
students against believing everything they read on the Internet.
The site, although
deceptive, is
entertaining.
It shows a
photograph of a beach with a swimmer
relaxing in the warm sun and calls Mankato a "hidden vacation Mecca
among
scores of knowing Midwesterners."
The site says
Mankato has everything thanks to
a freak of
nature: the Farr/Sclare Fissure. "This fissure in the earth's
crust
takes water seeping through the earth, heats it to well over 165
degrees, and
sends it back up to the surface in steam pits and boil holes. The heat
from
these pits and holes heats the valley air to such an extent that the
winter
temperature in many Mankato neighborhoods has never dropped below a
balmy 70
degrees!"
Of course, those
of us living through winters
here know it's as cold as anywhere else in the state.
The site also
shows purported photos of our
riverfront — views of Dutch windmills in the background with
multi-million dollar yachts on the river.
Oh, there's also a
pyramid. The site says it
was built under unknown circumstances and later swallowed up by an
earth tremor
in about 1300 B.C. "It was excavated in 1957 and remains as a
highpoint of the Mankato State University campus."
Finally, Mankato
is the home to one of the
world's largest nuclear submarine factories, according to the site.
This isn't the
first time unsuspecting
travelers have come looking for Mankato's amazing sites.
A few years ago, a
woman from Texas brought her
mother, from Kansas, on vacation to Mankato to see the underwater
city,
the pyramid and maybe do some whale watching. But when they arrived at
their
motel, they found no one knew about these and dozens of other
attractions the
website claims Mankato offers.
I'm not sure what
the couple who stopped by Ludeman's office
did while they were in town, but I hope
they enjoyed what we do have to offer.
Tim Krohn can be
contacted at tkrohn@mankatofreepress.com
or (507)344-6383.
