Social Distancing: Live Cam Postcards

A Travel Activity That Lets You Pose For The World To See

Here’s a silly thing you can do to make your travels a little more fun in our region. It’s kind of like a scavenger hunt, and makes for a fun photo op for your travels. Find all the places along your journey where there’s a live cam, and pose in front of it.

We have a lot of live cameras showing some of the wonderful sites in our region. I spent the weekend running around Minnesota, and tried to catch as many of them as I could. Here’s a live shot of the famed Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues in Bemidji.

My girlfriend and I posed in front of the statue over the weekend. I wanted to see his broken arm in person. It’s in pretty bad shape, but they were fixing Babe’s hooves over the weekend, so hopefully he’ll get patched up soon.

Then there’s another live camera there showing how beautiful Lake Bemidji is. It’s only a few hundred feed up the trail from Paul and Babe.

But sometimes the camera gets gunked up with spider webs. And this cam is far away enough that you can barely see yourself in the photo, but there we are near the bottom.

Now we’re taking you to one of the most famous places in our region, a place I can’t stop shutting up about. Itasca State Park has this live cam at the Mississippi Headwaters. You can reliably find tourists taking photos or wading across the water.

All of these cameras are on YouTube, so all you gotta do is search for them, pull them up and take a screengrab with your phone. Or you can call friends and loved ones and they can watch you clown around in front of the camera.

And finally, not all webcams are at landmarks or feature natural beauty. Some just show off the unique towns in our region, like the Park Rapids downtown live cam. I love how you can just park in the middle of the street.

So we posed in front of some of those cars. One thing about these cams is that they’re not 100% live. There’s a delay of a few seconds to almost a minute depending on the cam. So you can pose how you want, pull out your phone and wait for it to show up on the cam. Then you have an instant tourist postcard of your trip.

Those aren’t the only live cams you can do that with in our are. There’s downtown Devils Lake. There’s Big Ole in Alexandria. I’m sure I missed some. You’ve got options when you’re out in our region!

Tell me your fun travel ideas on Facebook and Twitter. Or send me your photos from local webcams!