July 2016

Hello everyone, the pre-adventure continued with a trip to Minneapolis for shopping and baseball. It was a long day! Apparently my body decided that I shouldn't get a good sleep before our one big outing, so I was up at 3:30am, laying there cursing anything I could think of to blame for lack of sleep. We were on our way to Park Rapids by 7am for some street sale Crazy Days shopping. Then continued with to the biggest mall in the US, Mall of America, for a solid 5 hours of shopping. Here's a sister shopping selfie:

After a few years in edmonton navigating West Ed, this mall was a breeze and was a successful stop for all of us.

Then we were off to the ball game. Which ended up being more of a production than originally anticipated.. I guess that's what happens when you head to downtown Minneapolis for the first time ever with a less than ideal map, no phone service and a terrible sense of direction/poor navigational skills in general. After sitting in a line of cars which ended up exiting to the freeway, we managed to exit to downtown and find our parking garage. Which we then spent way too long trying to figure out how to get out of and walking out onto the street at a totally different place than we had driven into. Luckily Liam has a 'great' (his word not mine) sense of direction to steer us towards Target Field where we successfully found the entrance (on our second try). After a fiasco with getting our tickets scanned, we managed to find our seats, find some food and sit down to take in 7(/9) great innings of baseball; Minnesota Twins vs. Baltimore Orioles. Those of you out there who have been trying (minimally successfully) to turn me into a baseball fan will be happy to know how much I enjoyed the game. The Twins threw a few great outs at home plate, some double plays, hit a home run and some other close calls that had the crowd cheering and had me out of my seat along with them. After 4 runs in the 7th, they clinched the 6-2 victory!
Here's the 3 of us at the game (in our newly purchased Twins caps):

Our seats were great, we had a good view of all the action.

Thankfully, navigating out of the city and back to the lake was much easier than getting there. After some driving games, including 20 questions with Pokemon, and 3.5 hours in the car, we made it back safe and sound. And ready to rest up for the fun of the long weekend to come.

Hello everyone and welcome to my first blog entry, covering what I like to call my 'pre-adventure', which really means the week and a half vacation at the family cottage in Minnesota. (AKA my favourite place on earth). I've been at this cottage for 25 out of my 26 summers! I only missed one year when I was off adventuring in Europe. I was even here when I was approximately 2 months old.. sorry to say I can't tell you many details of that summer besides that I was probably an angelically behaved baby
So far this week has consisted of sun, beer, food, and more sun. I managed to burn myself on just our second day here but that hasn't stopped me from further sun adventures. Thankfully I have a great gym instructor that has been sending me workouts, and Liam has joined me in these (though he hates them!) and we have gone golfing, walking, and out on the boat; so we are getting a little bit of activity! Today we set up beer pong on a float on the lake, just getting ready for all the family that will be here for our August long excitement.

Here's me in my 'Murica gear on our first day!

This is our cottage..

I'm pretty sure it's the cutest cottage on the planet.. but I may be slightly biased.

This is the view out on the water..

We've had a lot of calm days like that this week.. just beautiful!

This the fam that's here right now (minus Grandpa, he's not big on photos)

Mom, Maddie, Me and Liam.

Liam and I out golfing...

Our beer pong creation..

And lastly... Ellie and the lake!

Stay tuned for our Minneapolis adventure happening tomorrow!