Twins in the Twin Cities

The next morning we had to bulldog it through the rest of Wisconsin to get to Minneapolis in time for Heather’s flight home. Get this, rest areas in Minnesota offer free coffee. Maybe it is to encourage people to actually stop as they drive through the state of 10,000 lakes. Regardless, we made it to the airport right on time. If, for some reason, you find yourself dropping a friend off at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport you should know which terminal they are in. It is not like most airports where they have terminals 1-whatever of A,B,C, etc. here they have the Lindburgh terminal and the Humphrey terminal, and they about 7 miles apart. Furthermore, the signs for the respective terminals do not list the names of the airlines that flight into them. We were left to blindly guess which terminal to chose. We chose wisely.

Sadly, Heather had to go. She was such a beam of joy in a rather dull portion of our trip. I wish, just like I did with my uncle and dad, she could stay at least a week longer. Or the rest of the trip.

After she left we had some time to kill so we went to the nation’s largest mall, appropriately called the Mall of America. Let me tell you, it is large. There is an amusement park in it. I think you are spending too much time at the mall when you think, hey, lets go on a roller coaster on our way to Auntie Ann’s Pretzels and the Gap. Funny thing about this place is every single consumer is pasty white. You will not find one minority. It is like we were in bizzaro world. This is the first time that the two of us, dressed like we have been living in a van for the past month, did not stick out like a sore thumb. We found it rather peculiar not that the nation’s largest mall is in Minneapolis, but that there are other malls in this city! We saw two other malls. This town has more square feet of mall space than the Alabama has restaurants that specialize in waffles. Just like Wisconsin only cares about beer and the Packers, Minnesota only cares about hockey and malls.

We spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out with our host for the night, Dave and Anne, friends of our boy Eric Veneble. Dave and Anne have 4 lovely boys, all between the age of about 6 and 12. They were beams of energy. We had a lot of fun, but didn’t relax too much as you might imagine.

That night we headed over to the Metrodome. This all-purpose stadium is pressurized in order to support the dome which is simply a layer of Teflon less than an inch thick. So when we walked into the stadium our ears popped. How annoying is that. The stadium is your traditional domed stadium, very big and unexciting, nothing to enhance the game-day experience. However we did get excellent seats for cheap (we love the Midwest) and we watched an absolute gem of a game from Johan Santana. It was so bizarre seating there while there was a thunderstorm going on outside. We could actually hear the rain on the roof of the dome. And there were several occasions where there thunderclaps loud enough to echo through the stadium. Baseball is not meant to be enjoyed in the middle of a thunderstorm. To me that is God’s way of saying, get out of here, baseball is not meant to be seen in this ridiculous climate. But it was still a great game, the Twins edged the Indians 2-1 in the bottom of the ninth. The fans there were very knowledgeable and enthusiast. Our seats were so good that we were in prime foul ball territory. In the seventh inning we had a shot coming right at us. Geoff had the better position so he went for it, and it hit the hand of the man directly in front of him and then bounced a few seats down. Geoff didn’t really have the play but he made a valiant effort. I began talking to the man who ended up with the ball, he was from Philadelphia. Get this, he and his family were at the same Phillies game we were at. What are the odds. They wished us good luck on our trip and we left the stadium only to have our ears pop one more time.

We spent the night in the basement of the Sheldon household, which was a delight. Dave and his family were excellent hosts offering us a hot shower, a warm bed, a place to do laundry, and food for the road. Everything a roadtripper could possibly need.