A few miles east of Viking-crazy Alexandria stands a hard-to-miss landmark: a giant replica granite Runestone, 25 feet tall, erected by the Alexandria Kiwanis in 1951. It's a crowd-friendly, 5x larger version of the ancient runestone in the town museum, which was discovered in 1898. The replica is labeled to suggest it originally dates from 1362 A.D.
The big runestone copy traveled to the 1964 New York World's Fair in a miniature replica Viking dragon boat, which was driven to the Big Apple on the back of a flatbed truck. At the end of the Fair, New Yorkers -- unconvinced and still in the thrall of Columbus -- scarcely noticed when the runic-laden longship paddled west back to Minnesota.
