Short Skyway Adventure

 

This morning Travalon and I hit the road fairly early and stopped in Tomah to check out an antiques mall and art gallery. I was drawn to a painting even before knowing the artist had painted it with his feet, so I got that, and Travalon got a Count Chocula figurine, a Catwoman model, and a World War I biplane tin sign, as well as a rosary for me and a small model of the Milwaukee lighthouse. We also stopped at the Norske Nook in Osseo; we have one not that far from our house that we rarely go to, but this is the original so it's iconic. I really wanted the ligonberry sour cream pie, but they were out of it, so I had pumpkin cream cheese pie, and that was really good. Travalon had chocolate mint pie with little pieces of Andes Candies on top. Travalon's phone no longer charges in the car, so to save his battery he let me play music on my phone, since mine will charge in the car. I said we could skip any song he didn't like, but he didn't ask me to skip any - he thought they were all tolerable.

When we got to our hotel in downtown Minneapolis, we found it was overrun with Christian college students, who are having some sort of convention here. We wanted to go in the skyways, but they closed at six (the internet said ten), so they were already closed. We were able to access a couple of tunnels, and Travalon got some photos.

Check it out - there's a wedding going on in this skyway! You can see the bride in white.

We came back to the hotel and explored a bit, and we passed a table with huge sizes of T-shirts that said: "Free Shirts!" so we each took one. They were for the Christian convention, I think...? but all the Christian college students were thin, so they didn't need XXL and XXXL shirts. Eventually we had a late dinner at the bar; Travalon had poutine, and I had squash gnocchi with vegetables, walnuts, and a maple reduction sauce. We also split a margarita flatbread with arugula on it, kind of like a salad pizza. There is a pool at this hotel, and after dinner we peeked in and saw a couple of people who were just leaving, so we ran upstairs and changed. I wore my new free T-shirt over my swimsuit, and Travalon took this truly awful photo of me modeling it:

I wore the sweatpants on the way down to the pool, and nobody was milling around to see how lovely I looked. We had the pool to ourselves... for a few minutes, then some young guys came into it and took over the deep end, and then even more young guys came into it and started playing a game of frisbee. I was trying to swim laps, so I gave up and swam around the shallow end of the pool while Travalon waded. (I didn't like the bottom of the pool - it was slippery. But at least the pool wasn't freezing like some hotel pools we have encountered.) I didn't want to wear my sweatpants over my wet suit, so I just carried them... and then there were a whole bunch of college kids all over everywhere, and in the elevator with me, to see me wearing no pants, just a really oversized T-shirt that I obviously stole from their group. Or maybe they thought I was a chaperone? Anyway, my FitBit says I swam twenty-two laps, so I've worked off a fraction of that pie from Osseo.

Famous Hat