Up Nort’
This was the second weekend in a row that we left the house and went out of town. This weekend, the destination was Duluth. More specifically, our destination ultimately was our friends Kari and Per’s wedding. Originally, we were only going to stay up there for one night, but I found a great deal on a hotel for a buy one night and get one free with one free breakfast deal. That was so good there was no way we could pass that one up. So I left work a little early on Friday so that we could get a jump on the weekend travel. Once we made it past Forest Lake on 35, it was smooth sailing. We arrived in the city and checked into the hotel right around 8:00. We threw our stuff in our room and went out to grab something to eat. A couple Jimmy Johns sandwiches later, we were back at the hotel, using a free drink ticket the hotel gave us and hitting up the hot tub. Even though the tub wasn’t very hot, it still felt good. Back in the room, we discovered that we had HG TV. Since we don’t have cable at home, we were hooked! Once you start watching that channel, you can’t stop. There were many times throughout the weekend where we would say “this is the last show,” and then we would proceed to watch another two shows.
On Saturday, we woke up and went to get our breakfast in the rotating dining room at the top of our hotel. This was a pretty fun experience. I wish I would have brought my sunglasses to breakfast though. The sun was really bright reflecting off of the buildings and the lake. After breakfast and a couple HG shows, we made our way up to Enger tower.
If you’ve never been there, Enger Tower in on the top of a hill overlooking the city and the lake. It is a great location just to relax and enjoy the city. Not only is it a great tower to look out from, there are also some great gardens up there.
Across from the parking lot for the tower, there are more gardens and a great lookout place. They have some benches and a nice gazebo up on the hill so we took a load off and enjoyed the view of the city. We were really able to soak in the whole city from up there.
After resting on the bench, we packed it up and drove down to Canal Park. We had been there together before so we just decided to walk around and soak up the sun. The weather was pretty nice that day, a little breezy though, but since the town in right on a huge body of water, that is to be expected. We walked to the end of the pier and we were able to watch a boat drive though and the bridge lift for it. It was only a small, personal boat rather than a huge ocean liner, but that was OK.
That brought us to mid-afternoon so we headed back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding. We arrived at the church about ten minutes for it started so we ended up pretty close to the back of the church. Even though we weren’t very close to the front, we did have a good view of side of Sven Sundgaard’s face. Yep, he was sitting right in front of us. We expected to see him there as we knew he was a cousin of the brides. The wedding lasted right about 44 minutes. We filled out to congratulate the happy new married couple and waited to blow bubbles as they made their way to the limo. We jumped in the car and made our way over to the reception site.
The bride is a friend of Bethany’s from work which meant that I didn’t know anyone there. We ended up at a table with a couple other nurses and a few engineer friends of couple’s from college. They were all a bunch of fun people so we had a good time talking with them all. I had the walleye and Bethany had the chicken for dinner. That was the third time that I had walleye that week and each fish got progressively better. That was a big relief after I had the first fish of the week. We stayed at the reception talking with people until around 9:30 that evening. After getting some pictures with the happy couple, we headed back to the hotel.
Sunday was pretty restful as we didn’t end up checking out until about 11:30 that morning. We stop for some brunch at Perkin’s were I was able to get my French toast. After that glorious toast and a few cups of coffee, we got back in the car and made the couple hour trip back home. Since it was still nice outside when we got back home, we decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood. All in all, it was a pretty great weekend. Be sure to check out the rest of our pictures from the weekend.