A Day in My Life

We just returned from the very sunny city of St. Louis, Missouri. If you have never been there before, I would recommend that you make it a point to visit the city at some point. While it is smaller than the Twin Cities, for what it lacks in size, it makes up in culture. We made this the second trip to the city in less than a year in order to visit Bethany’s sister Erika and her husband Eric and their new little baby, Liv. If you remember, I posted when Liv was born about seven weeks ago. As you could very well imagine, we were making this trip with the primary goal of meeting and spending some time with our newest little niece.

I took last Thursday and Friday off of work so that we could make the most of our trip. We left shortly after Bethany got home from work on Thursday morning and headed out on our nine hour trip. As she had worked all night, Bethany did a lot of sleeping on the trip. Unfortunately for the both of us, I wasn’t paying very much attention to where we were going and I ended up missing an exit. Next thing you know, we’re taking a big detour through Des Moines. Whoops. It didn’t really take that much longer, and we got to see some nice sights in Iowa. We got down to St. Louis around 6:00 that night and proceeded to check into our hotel.

We quickly settled in and headed the 2.3 miles over to Erika and Eric’s house. That night, we just laid low around their house. Eric grilled some bison burgers and Erika whipped up a salad. I hadn’t had bison burgers before and I have to say I rather enjoyed them. After talking for a while and holding the baby, we took off for the night.

On Friday, we stopped by Einstein Bros on the way to their house for some bagels. Eric had to work that day so Bethany and I hung out with Erika and Liv that morning. We took turns passing Liv around between the three of us. She really is a very good baby. She is very content, doesn’t do a lot of crying, and does a lot of sleeping. That afternoon, we did a bit of baby sitting so that Erika could get out of the house and hit up the gym for a bit. When Eric got home from work, we got Liv all situated in her car seat and headed out to the St. Louis Art Museum. I was surprised with the amount and quality of art that is there. I must say I wasn’t expecting to see a wall size Monet there. On the way home from the museum, we stopped off for some dinner at a local resturuant/pub for dinner. Our timing was great since we got a table right away and made it there for the beginning of the Twins game. The food, drink, and game were all very good, I must say. After dinner, we went back to their place to hang out for a while before Bethany and I went back to the hotel.

The next day, we got ready for the day by putting on our Twins shirts. That’s right, the big event of the day for us was going to the Twins game against the Cardinals in Busch Stadium. We knew it was going to get pretty hot that day, so we lathered on the sunscreen since we are both still pretty white. After some breakfast at Eric and Erika’s, the baby sitter came and we took off for the game. I must say, we were not ready for the kind of heat that we would meet that day. Throughout the day, we saw the stadium thermometer top out at 99° as we sat in the direct sun. Eric checked out the heat index and saw that it was 105° shortly into the game so it’s anyone’s guess what it topped out at that day. Throughout the game, we went back for food/water every three innings just to get out of the heat. Also, a pleasant surprise was that my good friend Tim Koch was also in town and at the game. He stopped by for a little while during the game to catch up. What a small world! Unfortunately for us, the Twins weren’t able to pull out a win that day. We blame our loss on Mauer not playing that day, not on Pujols hitting two home runs.

After the game, we went back to their house to relieve the sitter and to cool off and just relax for a while. Eric and I made a quick trip to the storage locker to swap out a chair that afternoon and to pick up a salad for that night. For dinner, Bethany made baked lemon pasta from The Pioneer Woman, some garlic bread, and the salad. It was great. I thought it was even better than the first time she made it. That’s really saying a lot since it was fantastic the first time! After dinner, the ladies went and picked up some cupcakes at the Cupcakery. Those things are amazing! I had the Italian Cream cupcake that had coconut and cream cheese frosting. Boy was that thing great! That brought us to the end of the day and we headed to bed.

Sunday morning brought checkout at our wonderful hotel. After a quick checkout, we stopped for breakfast at a nice breakfast/lunch restaurant before we headed out of town. I had my usual French toast – you really can’t go wrong with French toast. After breakfast, we took a couple pictures with Liv and said goodbye to Eric and Erika. On our long drive, we tried to listen to the Twins game on any AM station that we could pick up. Thankfully, the Twins were able to win the series and improve their inter-league record. We made it home around 8:00 that night, unpacked, went for a quick walk, and went to bed. What a great weekend!

Be sure to check out the rest of the pictures from our trip here.

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.

For Memorial Day weekend, Bethany and I made the long trek up to South Dakota to visit her parents. We actually hadn’t made it up there since last August. I took Thursday and Friday off of work so that we could make it an even longer weekend. We left Thursday morning when Bethany got off of work after working for twelve hours. Needless to say, she slept for most of the ride. We made pretty good time on the eight hour drive by making it in only six and a half hours and we arrived mid-afternoon. We just bummed around the house for the rest of the day. It’s amazing how much a long drive can take it out of you.

Bethany has a dog at her parents house whose name is Sam. Sam, you should know, is a farm dog of farm dogs. He loves running around the farm, rolling around in mud, and eating whatever he happens to find. Because he is such a farm loving dog, he gets pretty dirty really fast. Bethany said that the last time she gave him a bath was when she was in high school. On Friday, Bethany decided that Sam needed to have a bath after all of these years. Let’s face it, he smelled. So she broke out the dog shampoo that was left from eight years ago and went to town on him while I just sat back and relaxed in the sun. Sam was such a sport. While I can’t say he really enjoyed the bath, he did put up with it without much of a struggle. After getting hosed off and shaking a bit, he did what any good farm dog would do, he walked right over to the driveway and rolled around in the dirt for a couple minutes. It was pretty much a taunt saying that no matter how clean you make me, you can’t change me.

Saturday we woke up a little earlier than we did the previous day, which really isn’t saying much, to head over to Aberdeen for some horse races. Aberdeen is the closest city to Eureka at about 70 miles away. We arrived at the track right about 1:00 on what was really a beautiful day. To our amazement, the tickets to get in were free and the program was only $3 so we decided to splurge for one. While we’re not gamblers, we did pick out a horse to root for each race. The first race started at 1:30 so we had plenty of time to scoop out the horses and have ours picked for the first race. What we didn’t realize after the first race was that it took 30 minutes before the next race would start. Thankfully, there were good concessions at the track for during the breaks. It was quite a fun day. What I didn’t realize though, was sitting in the same position all day puts the sun on the same side of me for the same amount of time. Unfortunately, this meant that the sun beat on me all day and gave me a nice sunburn on the left side of my neck and part of my face. Not a whole lot of fun let me tell you. Thankfully, the burn is about gone now and it doesn’t sting too much anymore.

We went to Bethany’s home church on Sunday morning at 9:00 which meant the earliest morning of the three. After church, we went back to the house and started to pack up our stuff. Along with all of our things, we also packed up a whole bunch of food. It’s hard to say no to a whole bunch of meat from a cattle farmer! That is some of the best meat you will ever have, hands down. After lunch, we loaded up the car and started the long trek back to Oakdale.

Just so you have an idea of what a good looking place South Dakota can be, here is a picture to mull over until you get your chance to visit. Be sure to check out all of my pictures from the weekend posted on my pictures page.