Last night I made more progress on drawing Minnesota geography.  I spiffed up the UI a bit to allow the user to pick the cities they want to include and also added some zoom/panning controls.  Right now everything is just with text boxes - ultimately I'd like to use sliders.  Below is a screenshot with some of the metro cities along with some outstate cities:

Next I really want to start getting the zoom and panning functions to work. IW Kid gave me a few suggestions about how to tackle it. His suggestion was to draw the graphics on a "canvas" and then use a "camera" to view the canvas at any point. Avalon DOES have a Camera class that is used in a ViewPort3D object. So what does this mean? This means I have to go 3D.  My app will need to go to “11“. Right now I'm just drawing everything as 2D.

This idea is turning out to work pretty well so far. I haven't parsed and hooked up any of the census data yet, but I think that will be icing on the cake compared to drawing all of the city, state, and zip code boundaries on the screen.