Wednesday, September 9, 2009

We toured Minneapolis and St Paul today. Saw the Capitol in St Paul. So far, we’ve seen the capitols in Frankfort, KY, Madison, WI, and St Paul, MN, not to mention the capitol in Indianapolis at night from the highway. They are all strikingly beautiful with lots of granite, marble and murals. We will be teaching a class in Capitols 101 after this trip. Can you say Rotunda?
Geography lesson---The Mississippi is quite narrow and shallow through this area. It joins with the St Croix river south of here to form the Mississippi that we are used to seeing.
We headed west for a rather uneventful afternoon seeing more wind driven generators (these were actually turning!) and a motel where all the rooms offered garages. Can’t imagine why!! Not sure but I think it gets cold up here!
We’ve been stopping at McDonalds to use the free WiFi to get our hotel rooms through Hotwire. Today, a young man came up to us after we had finished up and asked us if we were finding everything we needed. (Where was he when we were trying to spell Souix, Soux, Sioux Falls, SD?? Hotwire does NOT have spell-check.) In our conversation with him, we told him we were heading for Mt Rushmore and he said that he had recently spent his honeymoon there. He told us he especially liked the town of Deadwood. When I asked him if it was a neat, western town, he said in his distinctive Minnesota accent “Well, it’s pretty nice but, ya know, you can polish a turd, but it’s still a turd”. He could tell by our laughter that we had never heard that expression. It’s a good one.
One thing we’ve noticed is that people up here are exceedingly nice and have a lot of personal pride in their towns and property. It shows. Everything is so well cared for, overflowing with flower baskets and planters. Much like Canada.
More tomorrow.
SK
 

1 comment:

  1. Did the birthday boy have a fun day except for the COLDER weather? Maybe we can plan a girl's long weekend to Mall of America...LOL!

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