Road Trip - Day 5 Minneapolis

From: Sioux Falls, SD
To: Minneapolis, MN

Time: 4 hours
Distance: 270 miles

In Minneapolis our hotel is downtown - right in the middle of everything. It's a "business" hotel, which means that they charge for every little tiny thing - internet, phone calls, $7 for a bottle of water - since they figure people don't care since they'll just charge it to the company's expense account. Unfortunately, we don't have an expense account, so we are forced to drink water from the tap and not use the internet. So sad! That $6 bag of M&Ms is so tempting . . .

Since we got into town late, we headed off to the Mall of America, something we knew would be open past 5 p.m. We parked in "Maine" and walked around the four levels of 520 shopping opportunities and amusement park rides - our exercise for the day - and came home with . . . . not a single thing! That's right, we went to the Mall of America, and came home without a single receipt!

We wanted to save our money for Supervalu, which our GPS text-to-speech voice "Daniel," a British fellow, pronounced as "supervaloo." Only it didn't exist anymore. Despite this failure on Daniel's part, we managed to find a Festival Foods down the road, complete with a Scandinavian deli and bakery. There, we found that our Orowheat bread had turned into both Arnold's and Brownberries brands, and that in Minnesota, one cannot buy wine at a grocery store.

To drown our sorrows at this fact, we drove over to the University of Minnesota to see Frank Gehry's design for the Weisman Art Museum and the hospital in which I was born.

To drown even more sorrows, we utilized the very warm weather and visited the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Cowel's Conservatory, home to fantastically large sculptures made of two-way glass, bronze, wood, and plants.

Returning home, we watched the Somali television station in our hotel room - there is a large population of Somali Muslims in Minneapolis -because, hey, how many opportunities does one get to watch Somali TV? Then we whipped out the 12" laptop to watch a movie while Chamomile meowed at us repeatedly to let her into the rooms she sees in the two gigantic mirrors in our hotel room - she also meows repeatedly if we close her box of toys - we figure she misses Lucky, her playmate at my parents' house, and wants to annoy her "twin" in a similar manner.

We're just not entertaining enough for her!