Nebraska man on quest to visit every city in Minnesota completes southwest leg

A Nebraska man is on a quest to visit every incorporated city in Minnesota — all 856 of them.

Seth Varner, a 24-year-old from Wahoo, Neb., recently completed a jaunt through 74 towns in southwest Minnesota.

In social media posts on Facebook to his almost 9,000 followers, Varner has chronicled his experiences visiting Luverne’s nutcracker museum, touring the state’s smallest city with a mayor in Kinbrae, and paying homage to Laura Ingalls Wilder in Walnut Grove. He’s gazed upon the falls in Redwood Falls and felt the wind batter his car in Worthington.

Like a modern Marco Polo of the Midwest, or the Ibn Battuta of Interstate 35, Varner says he’s driven by the compulsion to capture the essence of the cities, big and small, that he visits.

“There’s something to be said about being able to go out and hit the open road and just go and see and do things you would never do before,” Varner said.

Varner got his start as a travel writer during the pandemic. Since then, he says he’s visited almost 3,000 communities, as part of projects to visit every city in five states — Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and North and South Dakota. He chronicles the visits to his Facebook followers — his Wandermore in Kansas page has 48,000 followers, while the South Dakota page has 19,000 — then sells his “ultimate guide” travel books online. (Kansas is on sale for $31.99 but only a few are left.)

Minnesota is his sixth state, and he describes it as his most extensive project yet.

Varner said he likes learning as much as possible about each town before he drives a single mile. He’ll pour over plat maps, atlases and railroad guides. And he’ll post his itinerary on his Facebook page, where hundreds of commenters will write notes about where he should visit in their town, where he should eat, what he should see.

And then he’s off in his Chevy Equinox, with his playlist of 4,000 songs and his trusty Rand McNally map. He says he plans to visit Minnesota in multiple eight- to nine-day chunks, before heading back to Nebraska to rest.

“I plan the actual itinerary for the trips literally down to the minute,” Varner said. He says he tries to photograph every church, business, school and notable landmark in a town, while remaining on schedule.

He makes appointments to visit with people who can tell him about the history of their city. But sometimes his kind hosts will give him a long, drawn-out Midwest goodbye, putting the schedule in peril, Varner said.

And once, in Lucan, an older man stopped him as he was taking pictures, asking him what he was doing around town. Varner said he wonders if the man saw his out-of-state license plates and thought he was a bank robber casing the town (pop. 201).

But Minnesotans have overwhelmingly been happy to help him understand their communities, Varner said. Some 82 people, including mayors, teachers, and random people on the street, took time to talk to him.

“People are excited that someone else is interested in their small town and the things in their small town,” Varner said.

His southwest Minnesota leg of his tour, the first in the state, brought him to 74 towns, 15 eateries, and four state parks over the course of 1,662 miles on the road, Varner said in a Facebook post on his Wandermore in Minnesota page on March 2.

But he still has more than 90% of the state’s cities to visit.

He expects to be on the road again, for a trip through central Minnesota, sometime in the next few weeks. He funds his travels through his guidebook sales as well as donations.

He anticipates completing his Minnesota tour by November and releasing the book before Christmas.

“People have a lot of passion and pride for their towns,” Varner said. “There’s something to do in every town.”