Just five miles away, in Saint Joseph, Minnesota, are Saint Benedict's Monastery and the College of Saint Benedict, which is fully coordinate in its programs with Saint John's University. A ninety-minute drive on Interstate Highway 94 takes you to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. With more theater seats per capita than any other city in the nation, museums, and many ethnic arts groups and religious congregations, the Twin Cities offer the Institute community important connections to diverse social, cultural, and spiritual activity. Everybody wonders about winter.
Thermometers do go down and snow does pile up.
But four and a half million people live in the state, and most of them like it, even in December and January. Highway crews plow a foot of snow faster than their counterparts in places farther south move an inch of it, and seldom are schools closed or roads blocked. You will remember the deer leaping across the frozen lake long after you forget that your nose got numb. South, into Saint John's, 1.2 miles on County Road 159. Turn into driveway, park along it.