3 days, 3 states, a ball game, and a wild party!

We just arrived home from another glorious weekend in the Twin Cities.  After looking forward to our return since we got back from our last trip in October, we decided that one more trip before we head back to the Bay would be a necessity. Thus begins the story of 3 days, 3 states, a ball game, and a wild party...

It started out on Friday, after being able to leave work a little early, we hit the road and headed South-East towards the Promised Land. We drove past farmlands, lakes, forests, and through some pretty crazy rain showers, and we made it, slightly fatigued but ready to take on our mini-vacation! After emergency toilet stops in the hotel, we got ready to head out to dinner. Using the guidance of Guy Fieri we planned out our meals for the weekend based on his recommendations on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. Our first stop...The Nook: A small burger joint on the end of a tiny strip of corner shops in the middle of a suburban neighborhood. When we walked into the place, we could tell it was a hoppin' spot. The wait for a table for 2 was 45-60 mins, but the host was nice enough to suggest we look downstairs to see if there was a table at the bar, so we did. We trekked down into the basement of this place, and to our surprise there was a bowling alley! Behind this cool find was a small bar area surrounded by windows, and there in the midst of all the hungry people was a table waiting just for us! So we meandered our way over and sat down and took a look at the menu. Jenni went with the burger the Nook was known for...The Juicy Nookie, and Brad picked the Paul Molitor, which was the same basic burger as mine but with a more adventurous cheese choice of pepperjack cheese! We had a legendary photo-shoot so that you could all enjoy our initial reactions to this delicious find!

The Juicy Nookie

Brad inspects the stuffed gloriousness

First bite!

Bug eyes mean only one thing

This shizz is yummy!

stuffed burger you say?

Let's try this!

cheesy smile!

It gets the thumbs up!

After enjoying the delicious stuffed burgers, we headed past the bowling alley and up the wooden staircase and back to the outside, and rainy world. Next door to the burger place was a neat looking ice cream parlor...so of course we went to investigate, despite the rain! We each got a single scoop then headed to the car to sit and enjoy our dessert! After ice-cream in the car, we headed back to our not-so-fabulous, and slightly ghetto Days Inn!

The next day we woke up to the aroma of freshly brewed, albeit cheap coffee, thanks to Brad's urge to try his hand at making coffee. This urge obviously led to a photo shoot of Brad's happy dance at the pleasant coffee aroma that proceeded to fill our ever-so-slightly ghetto hotel room. The delicious smell filled our olfactory nerves with joy and we headed to Starbucks for some breakfast and some REAL coffee. The cities gave us a fabulous day for an outside breakfast date of coffee and croissants. While eating breakfast we were both sure to check in on facebook to let everyone know that we were eating breakfast...welcome to 2012 the year of everyone everywhere knowing exactly what you are doing, when you are doing it! We also planned out what we were going to do on this glorious day in one of our newly found favorite cities!

Step 1: open coffee and place in coffee maker

Step 2: do a happy-coffee dance when the machine starts working

Step 3: take a whiff of that cheap coffee!

pondering life over breakfast...

After breakfast, we decided we would head over to Minnehaha Park to go for a nice walk and to see the waterfall that is there. Thanks to our smart phones we were able to find the park easily, and even found the parking lot close to the falls too! We got out of the car and headed down towards the waterfall, cameras in hand! Since it was such a gorgeous day, all the couples were out getting their engagement pictures taken, we thought about handing our camera to one of the photographers to snap a quick shot of us...but thought that probably wouldn't have been the most polite thing to do, so we stuck with our usual method of photography, the arm shot....

The creek that will fall as the falls

Minnehaha Falls

Brad's standard pose circa. New Zealand 2009

Jenni's standard pose circa. Irvine 2004

Brad owns the arm shot...no big deal

After admiring the falls and getting our pictures, we followed the trail along the river to soak up the sun and enjoy the day. We came across some bridges over flowing water, so Jenni insisted that we start up a game of Pooh Sticks. This is a tradition that Jenni grew up with in her A.A. Milne loving family. Everytime the Andrews clan ventured into nature, if there was a bridge over a flowing river there was a scramble to find the best stick and get to the bridge to play this timeless game. It is a simple concept, drop your stick in the river from one edge of the bridge, then run to the other edge and see whose comes out first! Since Jenni has been playing this game for most of her life, she knows the sticks to find, and as a result won by the crooked end of her perfect Pooh-stick stick!

Brad demonstrates excellent pooh stick dropping technique

Watching for the sticks to come through from the other side!

We love pooh sticks!

After all the pooh stick excitement, we kept on walking and found our way to the big bridge that went over none other than the Mississippi River (Yes Jenni did just recite the poem she learned to help her spell Mississippi there!) Without stating the obvious here, this river is a BIG river, we looked out over it and both exclaimed..."WOW! Now that's a BIG river!" It was crazy to think that if we constructed a raft, or bought a boat we could sail down to Louisiana on this baby....pretty cool given that we were only a few hours drive from Canada....mind blown! Here are some shots of us enjoying the view of the Grand ol' Miss!

Just in case you thought we made it up!

There it is!

CHEEEESE!

Brad with the Mississippi River

Go ahead...check out that river!

After all that walking and river excitement, we were feeling hungry, so we headed over to yes, you guessed it, another Guy Fieri spot! A little Italian cafe called Broders Pasta Bar. We had some delicious bruschetta followed by handmade pasta, Jenni tried the bolognese sauce which was heavenly!   It was a cool little spot, and we enjoyed our delicious food on the patio across the street, which was perfect since as you remember we were lucky enough to have some pretty sweet weather for our trip to the cities! Jenni got bolognese sauce all over her face from slurping up the spaghetti, which made for a good photo opportunity in Brad's opinion!

Enjoying some pasta

Cartoon face Brad!

Bolognese face Jenni!

After lunch we made our way back to the not-so-fabulous Days Inn for a nap before heading out again for our Baseball game later that evening. Glorious naps ensued and we got ready to make our way back to Minneapolis for the night. We got to the city with enough time to relax at one of our favorite spots in town, Gold Medal Park. We walked up the windy path to the top of the hill and lounged in the grass watching the cotton seeds fly through the air as we admired the bridge across that big ol' river! While we were peacefully enjoying the day we saw quite the sight....an army of segways riding on the bike path all in a seemingly never ending line. Jenni grabbed her camera between giggles because it just looked so silly....

Enjoying the view!

SEGWAY...

INVASION!

We then headed into downtown to find parking before making our way towards Target Field, where the Minnesota Twins play! On our way we stopped to check out the Mary Tyler Moore statue, that we somehow missed on our last trip to the cities. While we were waiting to get a shot without people  in the background, a flamboyant gentleman with a Cal shirt asked if we wanted him to get a picture of us together, so we of course said yes!

Jenni missed the hat throwing memo....

We thanked the nice flamboyant Cal man and followed a herd of Twins fans to the baseball game! It didn't take us long at all to get there and we were pleasantly surprised to be greeted at the gates with a free hat....WOO! Jenni switched from her favorite Cal hat to this new and gloriously cheap free Twins hat! We made our way to the seats after Brad admired this new ballpark that he could now check off his list of visited parks! We had some pretty good seats right above home plate and took some pictures, finding a nice employee who offered to take one of both of us...so many nice people in the twin cities!

Brad and Target Field!

Brad is clearly a better photographer than Jenni...

Thanks nice Target Field employee!

The game was pretty fun, it was weird for Jenni not to be able to see the Bay Bridge in the background, or checking out Mr. Easy-on-the-eyes Pat Burrell. One thing that was the same....almost was the SCRAPER guys! Jenni has a weird love for the groundscrew men who drag the scrapers around the bases after the 3rd and 6th innings. At this ballpark, she was initially disappointed to see the scrapers being dragged by a tractor rather than the awesome running men before the game started, but was delighted to see them run between innings. For the true baseball fans reading, the Twins did not win, but both teams pitched pretty well and there was even a play on the 3rd base line that made it to the high-light reel on ESPN later that night! WOO!

Scraperrrrrrrs!!!!!

After the game we made our way over to the British pub we discovered on our last trip to Minneapolis. On our way over we were pretty confused as to why the streets were so dead, and even more shocked to be told that the third of the pub that we chose to sit in would be closing in the next 10 minutes (it was not even 10 PM at this point). We could not figure out how a city that is so awesome could be so dead on a beautiful Saturday night. We pondered this baffling thought as we enjoyed our beverages and talked about how tired we were from the busy day we had had. We payed our tab and started getting ready to leave and make our way back to the car when we heard some loud music coming from outside, we turned around to look out of the window and could not believe what we saw! There was a huge crowd of people just walking down the street blasting music....we looked at each other and our faces lit up with excitement as we started trying to figure out what could be going on. On our way out of the pub there was a weird and random encounter....Jenni, wearing her favourite UC Irvine sweatshirt walked through the door and heard a guy say...."Hey look Irvine, better tell Jenni"! SO weird, Jenni started laughing proclaiming to Brad that SHE was in fact Jenni and that guy was going to TELL Jenni about the Irvine shirt he just saw! Probably not so weird when you think about the abundance of Jenni/Jenny/Jennie/Jennifer named people in this world....but still, weird! We then headed towards the loud-music-playing crowd to go and see what was happening. To sum it up, people were just dancing in this courtyard and were walking around with legit ghetto-blasters (boomboxes) on their shoulders all blasting the same music. When we heard "I'm sexy and I know it" we put on our boogie shoes and joined that dance party as the smell of weed wafted all around....

DANCING PEOPLE!

Wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle!

As we were trying to figure out what we had discovered, the party started moving...what we thought was a college party transformed into a nomadic celebration of dancing-high people with bikes and ghetto-blasters (boomboxes) through the streets of downtown Minneapolis. Did we follow, you ask....HECK YES we did, this was amazing, and we just got our second wind so we became nomadic boogie folk and joined the ranks. Laughing and singing and dancing along we went until the crowd stopped again to dance some more, this continued all the way up the main street, with Brad and Jenni in tow. We stopped a few times and even enjoyed a techno version of "Are You Going to San Francisco" which we of course sang along to at the top of our lungs! The party picked up a lot of people, bachelorette parties and dancing bananas along the way, all making for an epic dance-filled adventure ending with a lovely slow dance to Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing"! Here are some more pictures of this amazing and random adventure...

Arm-shot fail

So many people dancing!

After our romantic slow dance in the street

After all that dancing, and possibly pot inhalation, Jenni got the munchies. In true Harold and Kumar style we decided we just had to make a stop at White Castle on our way home. In theory this seemed like a great, and memorable idea. In hindsight, however, this was a baaaad idea. It was 11:30PM by this time, and after the first bite of those disgusting mini-burgers, we both regretted this life choice. Jenni's stomach protested and spent the last night and our next morning feeling not so great and Jenni was trying to earn forgiveness from her tummy. 

The next day, we decided that we would drive to Wisconsin for breakfast...yes Wisconsin. Turns out, the border is not too far out of St. Paul, so we took the detour and found the first Starbucks East of the border to hit up for breakfast! Two things we noticed about Wisconsin, first, they have fancy umbrellas outside their Starbucks. Second, their Starbucks drive-thru speaker machine is set up right next to the outside tables where we chose to sit. So we enjoyed our coffee while judging people in the drive-thru lane based on their drink orders....so much fun! 

Fancy Starbucks umbrella

After breakfast we headed over to the Mall of America, only to discover that it was the main hub for a Breast Cancer walk that weekend, so we followed the detour and headed South to our favourite deli in the area to grab some lunch for the road home!

Brad enjoys his Briannos sandwich!

That's about it for our legendary trip to the cities. Until next time, Minneapolis-St. Paul...