You can’t drive from Rochester to Erie today, thanks to a record-breaking wall of snow south of Buffalo. But that’s OK: today’s Toppy update is a thousand or so miles to the west on I-90, taking in a chunk of southern Minnesota that should probably be moved to its own “Austin-Albert Lea” market separate from where we put them in Rochester (the other one) when we get around to it. And it continues into the eastern fringes of the Sioux Falls, South Dakota market, which has been woefully under-Toppyed until now.

The matching pictures are over at Site of the Week, of course!

Even in the usually brainless process of entering the tag information for today’s big batch of Toppyness, my fingers kept wanting to type “Rochester NY.”

But our recap of Big Trip 2013 has brought us from The One True Rochester (we have garbage plates! and waterfalls! and a really big lake! and Kodak! Or at least what’s left of it!) to that other place that shares the name, Rochester, Minnesota. Which is actually a pretty nice place, with lots of nice IDs you should check out. And then go look at the pictures, here!

(And then buy a calendar, because it’s finally back from the printer!)

Next week: Austin! Albert Lea! Blue Earth! Fairmont! Worthington! Luverne! All aboard! (Spoiler alert…the earth in Blue Earth is actually brown.)

Unless you’re one of those snooty types who says “po-TAH-toe,” that is.

We speak here, of course, of the fine small city of Mankato, Minnesota, 90 miles southwest of the Twin Cities, home to one TV station, the Vikings’ training camp, a great local family-owned radio group, and…OK. that’s about as much as we saw when we passed through on Big Trip 2013.

But we sure did get a lot of IDs! (It’s the first Mankato update here since the Topfather himself, Brian, passed through back in 2002.) And if ours aren’t enough, check out Garrett Wollman’s collection from the same trip, over at the [email protected].

Find all the Mankato Big Trip pictures over at Site of the Week – and come back Friday for a visit to the Other Rochester…

Yeah, I know. It wasn’t your season. (Not that my team was anything to write home about.)

It hasn’t even been your decade, really. (Can’t say that about my team, I guess.)

So while we both sit back and watch the last couple of innings of baseball for the season, perhaps you’d at least enjoy hearing a big pile of IDs from the Minneapolis-St. Paul market? They’re part of Big Trip 2013, now unspooling over at Tower Site of the Week…you should go look while you wait to see who replaces Gardenhire next year.