Getting the flavor of...America’s only tank park, and more

America’s only tank park

A specialized amusement park in southern Minnesota offers paying customers an experience that’s “ideal for satisfying one’s inner Rambo,” said Jeff Baenen in the Associated Press. At Drive a Tank (driveatank.com), $399 buys you a chance to maneuver a military tank around a wooded course and fire a historic machine gun. For an additional $549, you can use the tank to smash a junk car, and for about $3,500, you can crush a trailer house like a pancake. Every package includes a sit-down lesson on the history of armored vehicles, which you’ll appreciate later. Even a simple spin through the woods turns out to be a “loud, grinding, hot, and dirty” ride, but there may be no better way to get “a firsthand sense of what armored warfare might be like.” Better still, the adventure will nourish a fantasy you’ve no doubt had at least once while sitting in traffic—that you were granted the power to “roll over everything in your path.”

A millionaire’s row in Wisconsin

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There aren’t many places in America where you can “amble over the lawns of 1-percenters with names like Wrigley, Driehaus, and Rockefeller,” said Brian E. Clark in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. But at Wisconsin’s Geneva Lake, which has drawn wealthy weekenders for generations, a 19th-century law allows the public to walk the 18-mile coast of the lake anytime they want. I promised my children that we’d trek just part of the loop when we started out one morning from the town of Lake Geneva. Over the next eight miles, we passed “hundreds of beautiful summer homes.” The “most impressive” estate was a Georgian Revival mansion that recalls Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, but more entertaining was a property belonging to arts patron Bonnie Deutsch, who encourages passersby to explore the sculpture collection on her lawn. The Grand Belle of Geneva, a small passenger boat, carried us back to our car in style.