minneapolis- saint paul

I don't think I am happier than when I am exploring with my favorite people. (Well, except for when I am cozy at home with my favorite people. I am equal parts wanderer and homebody. I have learned that I crave a good mix of both in my life.) There is a sweetness and lightness and appreciation to life when traveling that I may have become a bit addicted to.  Ben and I jump at reasons to take trips together, always choosing experiences over gifts as the way we celebrate milestones. 

As we wrapped up 2019, a year that presented some challenges in its second half, and began 2020, the last full year we have together under one roof as a family of six and a year I am determined to savor, we chose to get away together as a family for a few days as our Christmas gift to one another.  We had fallen in love with Minnesota in the summer of 2018 and wanted to see it in the winter as well.  

I think it's fun to remember that the entire trip came together ridiculously easily about nine days before we left. At first we weren't going to take a trip at all... and then we were just going to take the teenagers on a trip .... and then we arrived at the decision to keep the six of us together and visit somewhere within driving distance (because, see above, 2020 is the last full year we have before college starts to pull some of us away. sigh. I promise not to harp on this, but it is messing with my mind.)  Once we arrived at Minneapolis as the destination, we had the rental car (we use points on long trips to avoid the wear and tear on our vehicles) and rental house (I love vrbo!) reserved online in under an hour.  I pinned activity and restaurant ideas on Pinterest, hopped on Amazon to order bigger snow gear to replace our outgrown pieces, and rearranged just a couple of things on the calendar so we could leave town for four days. Santa let the kids know about the surprise in a letter left on Christmas morning. It was almost too easy.

We had friends over on New Year's Day and then loaded up the rental van that night so we could leave at dawn on January 2. The drive to Minneapolis was about eight hours. Since we left early, we had time for a coffee/ breakfast stop at one point and later a long lunch at a brewery in Waterloo, Iowa and still were able to check in to our rental home at four. We immediately loved our home for the weekend and knew we would be very comfortable there.

After freshening up, we asked the kids what they wanted to do on our first night. They chose the Mall of America for shopping and dinner. The Mall of America is definitely an experience- and not my favorite experience. I was glad to get it out of the way on the first night so we could have the rest of the trip to do the things I was much more excited about. We wandered the mall for three hours and did not come close to visiting every store we wanted to. Drew had the most fun by far, which was no surprise to any of us. The kid loves to shop and is so very into clothing these days. 

Lunch stop- we had the entire brewery to ourselves and enjoyed games while stretching our legs a bit. The raspberry sour beer and buffalo cauliflower got two very enthusiastic thumbs up from me. 

Ben captured this picture and it still makes me sad to remember this moment.
This picture could maybe be captioned "Sometimes Santa messes up."
We got to the mall and discovered that the American Girl Store was closed permanently. Santa had mentioned the store in his letter on Christmas morning, and Kate had traveled with her favorite doll and had set Christmas money aside to get her doll's ears pierced. She was pretty upset and we all felt bad for her. She asked many questions about how Santa could have not known the store had closed. It was such a disappointment. 

Macarons and a roller coaster inside the mall helped to ease Kate's pain just a bit. 

Much to Kate's excitement, the girls got to share a large bedroom for the weekend.
Kate loved her special bed alcove with curtains.

Morning two began with sledding. This may have been my favorite activity of the trip. We had thrown sleds into the van almost on a whim and I was so glad we did. Minneapolis/ St. Paul has many parks with outdoor ice skating and sledding and we lucked out with the park we chose to visit. We had it almost all to ourselves and it was a great sledding hill. Climbing up the hill a dozen times was also a great way to move our bodies after so many hours in the car the day before. We had very red-faced kiddos by the time we left, both from the cold and from the exercise.

After sledding, we drove to Minnehaha Falls. We loved seeing the falls and surrounding park covered with ice and snow. Kate took her brothers on in a long snowball fight. 

We were ready to warm up a bit, so we drove to the Global Market to enjoy lunch. There were food vendors from around the world, so everyone got to choose exactly what sounded best to them and then we all met at the tables in the middle to eat together. Kate had orange chicken and boba, Leslie had vegetable curry, Luke had a gyro, Gracie had veggie tacos, Drew had a taco, and Ben had tamales and street corn.

 Lunch was followed by touring the American Swedish Institute. I think it is fair to say that we all had pretty low expectations for this stop, but Ben was interested in going and a friend had just mentioned on New Year's Day how much she loved it, so we decided to give it a try. It turned out to be a really great stop. The exhibits were educational and interesting, and the mansion itself was beautiful. Grace commented that it was like stepping in to another time.

 We spent the rest of the afternoon seeing street murals, driving around the University of Minneapolis campus, walking the Stone Arch Bridge to take in the Minneapolis skyline, and stopping in the most charming coffee and record shop where the owner took a special interest in us and reinforced our understanding of the phrase "Minnesota nice." After making the most delicious and pretty coffee drinks for us (including offering a special "coffee" drink for Drew who he could tell really wanted to be like everyone older and have a coffee drink, but doesn't yet really like the taste of coffee), he came over to our table in between customers to chat. He told us it made him happy to see a big family going out to coffee together and that he had grown up going to coffee houses with his family. He offered us a free record and had stickers for the kids. It was one of those really unexpectedly good vacation stops that are so perfect to stumble into.

Kate loved this tiny door on the side of a wall mural. 

That evening we went to the minor league baseball stadium for ice skating and tubing. The stadium had covered the infield with a skating rink. We enjoyed seeing the "behind the scenes" of the stadium as we went to the dugout to put on skates. Kate declared this her favorite activity of the day. So neat to see a city embrace winter so well.

Our night ended with dinner and dessert on Grand Street. We had dessert at "Treats" where all of the desserts were centered around cereal. I don't think anyone was all that impressed with the actual taste of the dessert as they were basically Blizzards with only cereal to choose from as the flavor, but it was fun to try something new. By the time we returned to our rental home thirteen hours after leaving that morning, we were ready for warm showers, pajamas, and comfy beds.

These two spent the entire time we were having dessert talking about cereal characters. 

Our second day in Minnesota was almost spent driving north to Duluth. There were so many fun winter activities to do there that we were very tempted, but it meant another 4.5 hours in the car roundtrip, and the kids weren't so excited about the prospect. Ben and I would have pushed through without doubt if it was just the two of us, but we understood their point and lost the family vote. Instead, we had another day exploring in Minneapolis and St. Paul. We started the day with the winning activity of the entire day- Mill City Museum. This museum was impeccably done and offered a fun and educational look at the history of the city. There was a part of the tour that offered a great view of the city. As we were leaving, Kate said to me, "Thanks for taking me there. I wasn't expecting to like that so much!" I think we all kind of felt the same way. 

We walked to the nearby Guthrie Theatre to take in the view as well. 

Lunch on day two was for Ben and Luke- Juicy Lucys. This was high on Ben's list of must-do activities for the trip. The restaurant was packed and seat yourself (not easy for a group of six), but we eventually got seats and had a nice lunch with more Minnesota-nice people around us.

The kids were, understandably, hoping for more snow time on our second day, so we decided to drive to the largest park in Minneapolis. It was not quite the sweet, wholesome experience of sledding on day one. There were people e v e r y w h e r e, including walking up the path where people were sledding down. After Luke landed in the trees swerving around someone on the path, we decided this wasn't our stop.

We drove to the ice castles being built in the area even though we knew from checking the website that they were not yet open to visitors. Even though we couldn't get up close or go inside, it was still interesting to see them in progress and to see that it is quite the production!

The rest of the day included vintage shops, another coffee stop, and a game store for Luke. We asked Gracie to choose our restaurant for dinner and she took us to a Thai restaurant downtown. We tried to do another round of evening outdoor ice skating, but the park we wanted to visit was closed to skating for the night. Knowing we had to leave the next morning, nobody was in a hurry to call it a night, so we opted to drive to a nearby Barnes & Nobles to spend Christmas gift cards from Aunt Barb and Uncle Jeff. We spent a happy hour looking at books before finally deciding to head for home.

All too soon the next morning we were loading our things into the van to drive home. It was a pretty uneventful day, but we did have an audiobook and a stop for Wisconsin beer and cheese to help pass the time. Kate's excitement for some seven year sharp white cheddar was pretty humorous. We stopped in central Illinois to get Auggie and Bear back from my parents (THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!) and got home just in time to unpack, take showers, and prepare to return to work and school the next day.

pictures texted to me from my parents while we were on the trip:
Clearly our dogs love their time in Decatur.