Summer vacation part 1
Monday Aug 13, 2007
We got back Sunday afternoon from a summer vacation to Minnesota to visit relatives and see the sites. I'll have a few blog entries about it.
We left early Friday July 27 and made our way up I-35 to Kansas City. When we did this same drive two summers back, we stayed across I-35 from Worlds of Fun and Oceans of Fun, so we decided to do the same. However, this time it was a Friday evening, we should have booked a hotel in advance. We did find a room near this area, so we could at least stop driving. We had breakfast Saturday morning at a nearby Waffle House, and then continued north.
We arrived in Bloomington, Minnesota, where I grew up and my mother still lives in the house she and my dad bought around 1955, on Saturday afternoon. We relaxed around the house the rest of the day, and resisted the urges of our boys Nick and Sam to take them to Running Park.
We stayed with my mother until Monday August 6. During that time we saw my cousin Phil's son Henry for the first time, saw Phil and Cheryl, my aunt Marion and uncle Winton, my niece Lisa and nephews Steve and Jeff, my brother Tom, and even my uncle Richard and aunt Janelle from Arizona, who were passing through on their way home from a long summer vacation. The only local relative we didn't see was my sister-in-law Vera, whose work schedule is a bit crazy when the Minnesota Twins are playing a home stand, as she is a manager for the concessions at the Metrodome.
While we were in the Twin Cities, we saw all of these things:
- Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. After numerous visits to the area over the 18 years we've lived elsewhere, we finally visited just one unit of this wildlife refuge. Very cool.
- Historic Fort Snelling. Nick really loves this place, and the rest of us enjoy it too. During "sick call", Nick got his "broken" arm set, and it made us glad for modern medicine! We learned that Dred Scott and his wife lived at the fort for seven years, and that time was part of the basis for their lawsuit to be declared free persons rather than slaves. The Supreme Court decision against them probably hastened the Civil War.
- Como Zoo. Como Zoo is a free zoo in Como Park in St. Paul. I've been going there for over forty years. In addition to the zoo, Sam really enjoyed the amusement park there. Nick didn't enjoy the amusement park so much, as the rides are geared more towards younger kids.
- Minnesota Zoo. This is the modern zoo in the Twin Cities area. Also very nice.
- Science Museum of Minnesota This is great museum for kids, with lots of hands on exhibits. The boys call this "the dinosaur museum" due to its displays of dinosaurs and the dinosaur heads you can control. We also made it outside for the first time, where they have miniature golf and a place where you can sluice for gems (after you buy a bag of dirt that's seeded with gems).
- Minnehaha Park. We took the light rail from the Mall of America area to Minnehaha Park and back. The train ride itself was a highlight for the kids. At the park, we saw a trickle of water going over the falls when we arrived, as it's been a dry hot summer in Minnesota. We hiked down the creek bed from the falls to the Mississippi River, and saw lots of crayfish and fish in the creek. Towards the river there are some sandstone cliffs where people have been digging caves for decades, and the kids joined in on that. The river was down pretty far. Looking up stream, you can see Lock and Dam No. 1, but there wasn't much activity there, probably due to the tragedy upstream, the I-35W bridge collapse that happened a few days before.
I've probably missed a site in that, but isn't that enough for one week?
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