So during the past couple weeks, I have been doing everything I can think of to make my extremely long week days go a little faster. Each week we've been able to make a trip to the Walker beach so that takes up a few hours which is nice. The thing I am mostly excited about though is that we are moving!!! Yes, AGAIN!!! But this should be so much better than where we are currently for most days during the week.
(The bread turned out wonderfully, by the way...I was kinda worried since it has been forever since I've made my loaves with the Bosch, I kinda forgot how to do it!...but they are wonderful...just so you know)
So where are we moving to? To a little condo in a resort up north. It's small (820 sq ft...please don't complain about your "small" house...we have 4 children remember and this will do us just fine, almost 3 times the sz of the camper!) but here's the good part....it's fully furnished! We will have a couch to sit on, a bed to sleep on, and yes, a table to eat at!! It's real crazy now when I feed the kids, I get their plates ready, set them on the floor and tell them to come and eat! I feel like I'm calling the dogs. I just tell them we are having a picnic for every meal and they could care less where they sit. But for us, it will be nice to have a table! The price also includes all the utilites so that will be nice to not have to worry about what the cost of heating it in the winter will be, etc.
We will be 'moving' there after labor day. And I saying 'moving' because we're not really moving...just moving to work...if that makes any sense...
Anyway....onto the fun stuff.....
Last weekend Nathan and I went away for a much needed date! Some friends of ours we willing to watch the kids for us for a few days while we relaxed and did whatever! We decided to go down to the cities to find some stuff to do there. Before we left, there were only 2 things that I had booked for us...1) a twins game and 2) a brunch cruise on the mississippi. The rest of the weekend we were going to take on the fly.
We dropped the kids off at about 9:30 Friday morning and headed down to the cities. We stopped first at the Christian bookstore in Maple Grove while we waited for Don Pablos to open :) Nathan bought a book about Tim Tebow (which he says is awesome) and a Tenth Ave No CD (which we will see in concert on sept 15!). After lunch, we were off to find the James J Hill mansion in St. Paul.
Wow! Is that place huge!!! 36,000 square foot house...can you image??? It was built in the 1800s which makes it even more amazing. The detail in the woodwork was phenominal and all the nooks and crannys...wow. It was definitely worth going to tour..and it's a guided tour so you learn some more stuff about how life was lived back then and a little more details about the family. For those of you who don't know, James J Hill was the founder of the Great Northern Railroad and a bazillionaire...the richest man in the world at his time.
Some of the interesting tidbits I remember from the tour:
1) The are 427 keys for the doors in the house
2) The built in organ in the music room has 1200 pipes.
3) There was a safe behind a secret door in the formal dining room.
4) All the dust collected by the women cleaning was put down a shute and taken out by the men.
5) There are 42 rooms (largest one being 1500 sq ft alone), 13 bathrooms, & 22 fireplaces.
6) It cost just over $500,000 to build (just under $1 million with all its furnishings and land, etc)....today that would be over $16 million. (After seeing it you would think it's even more than that)
There are really so, so many things and I could go on and on...you just have to go visit for yourself. You can go over to this link http://collections.mnhs.org/MNHistoryMagazine/articles/55/v55i06p234-249.pdf and see a pic of the outside (and read the article if you want, actually I would recommend it as I'm reading some of it now...very detailed about the house and shows the floor plan as well) It really is amazing.
After the mansion tour, we were off to the zoo! We made a swing through the Como Zoo and enjoyed looking at the animals at our own pace instead of 4 kids pulling us in 4 different directions...it was a nice change of pace :)
After that we checked into our hotel....The Westin...in downtown Mpls...just a stones throw from the Target Field, to which we headed at about 6:00.
Since this hotel used to be a bank, which they converted in 2007, the bank vault is now a wine cellar.
The weather was absolutely perfect and I don't think we could have even asked for much better! The twins lost to the Yankees horribly but it was nice to see the new stadium in person. When the game first started, there were 2 completely annoying people in front of us...in 2 different groups of people. One of them was a 9ish yr old girl who kept screaming and demanding food from her parents and they left the game before the 1st inning was even over...yes, it was that bad. The other was a drunk indian who kept yelling obsenities and who was just obnoxious...and he got kicked out of the stadium. So after that, everything was clear sailing!
At one point in the game, we looked over and to our surprise, this camera was right in our face...uh...do we wave? Why is he here? Since we haven't been to a game before, we had no idea was the "kiss cam" was until the camera man came out from behind the camera, looked at us, and said "Kiss!" Ohhhh!!! ***smoooooch*** So yes, we made it onto the jumbo screen :) Guess the camera man knows a cute couple when he sees one.
After the game, we returned to the hotel to eat a burger and fries at the hotels restaurant....completely horrible, awful food. Shoulda complained but we didn't.
On a weird note...twice I found valuable stuff in that hotel that I turned into the front lobby. One was in our room, on the desk, there was this jewelry box sitting by itself with a note to someones name that was not us, with a silver pocket watch in it....the other time was a womans wallet (with a bit of cash in it) left on one of the chairs in the lounge area. Hmmm.....
...Ok, I was going to finish our whole weekend on this post...but I'm actually getting tired and I have waaaaaay too much stuff to get done this weekend for me to be sleepy, so I'm going to stop here and hopefully finish tonight or tomorrow. The best part of the trip is coming up next so don't miss out! What we did on sat was unbelievely fun...can't wait to tell!! :)
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