Superior Weekend

A week before school starts my mother tells us she'd like to have the grandkids for a weekend.  With school looming and hockey about to start we inform her gently that 'a' weekend means 'this' weekend or sometime in June.  So plans are tentatively laid for the kids to spend the weekend at Grandma's.  By Wednesday mom tells us that her brother (Uncle Jim) wanted to see her and she was considering going up north to his cabin on Big Sandy Lake.  By Thursday Jim needs to put his boat in the water in Duluth and do some work on it.  You may have caught on to my mom's planning skills by now, bless her but she will change plans around trying to accommodate as many tasks and people as possible.  It continues this way and when the dust settles we're not in Kansas anymore.  Now my mom, her husband Tim, uncle Jim, and his wife Sherry, Bird and I, the boys, and our little dog Jo-Jo too are all going up to Duluth for the weekend.  We've booked an overnight stay for Saturday on labor day weekend at the Radisson [pet friendly!] and mom has chosen the Lake Castle Motel because as a child her family once stayed there for a month and it will give her a chance to explore and reminisce.  Even though she's a little disappointed that it has changed owners now and she won't have a chance to talk with the caretakers from her childhood.  I apologize for this slight divergence into my family mental patterns, but it's the best way to give you a proper sense for the slight chaos it creates.  ...onward and upward.

Mom and Tim spend the night at our house and on Saturday morning we all head up to Canal Park where we plan to eat lunch before meeting up with Uncle Jim.  When and where we are meeting him is mostly up in the air as you can imagine.   After lunch at Hell's Kitchen [yummy!] we give Jim a call for directions to the slip where he keeps his boat.  At this point we are given a heading but they are en-route themselves and will call us back when they verify street names.  We start in the general direction and manage to find the place using the noted landmarks.  Cross the bridge, get off when you see the gas station, go straight across two sets of train tracks, etc...  I'm honestly surprised there wasn't a left at the doghouse.

We'd been on Uncle Jim's pontoon in the past and were puzzled by what work he could possible need to do on it and on Lake Superior at that, so we were surprised and relieved to find that he had actually purchased a 30-foot boat last Spring.  We all piled on the Knotty Lady II and started cruising around the harbor.  Bird has a thing about sailboats and large bodies of water, and you'll never find her mixed in with both those ingredients.  Luckily Jim's boat is not the sail driven variety, but when I heard Jim mention he was planning to take us out onto Superior I told Bird she should ready herself to take some pictures underneath the lift bridge.  She scoffed at me, "Yeah, right!"  Okay, fine then, don't believe me.  I'll just sit back and wait for the comprehension to set in.  That will be worth something in itself.  A short while later there was the look on her face I had been waiting for and with a glance in my direction she totally satisfied my quiet vengeance.  Wife:1 Husband:1  We tooled around on the lake for an hour before following an arriving ship back into the harbor.  It had been such a gorgeous day and it was nice that we got to spend it with my family in such a great place.  It was definitely the Emerald City of our trip.

We parted ways to go check in at our evening lodgings while Jim and Sherry headed back to their cabin.  After this we were going to meet Mom for dinner.  You guessed it...where and when exactly we didn't know.  It turns out there is a Lake Castle Restaurant next to Mom's motel AND her motel is pet friendly too.  So we can leave Jo-Jo in her room while we all go to eat.  It's hard for us not to plan better at this point in our lives while we have kids but it always seems to work out in the end.

Bird has been wanting to try out the infamous Sleep Number beds, and one of the selling points at the Radisson is that they have them.  We got a room with two of them, but as it turns out they are both standard size, and the standard size beds don't have dual comfort controls so Bird and I were ultimately test driving ours at a disadvantage.  Without the bed at its firmest setting it tended to create the center, gravity pulling cavity of discomfort.  I've actually had better nights on pull-out sleeper sofas and I won't be running to the store to line up a Sleep Number anytime soon.

In the morning we ate breakfast and headed to Canal Park for coffee and shopping.  Mom was planning to take the boys for us for a couple hours but we had no idea when or where we'd meet up with her.  Eventually we made our way to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, one of our favorite places, as we always stop there.  Of all the candied applies, sugary confections, toffees, caramels, and chocolates on display today the boys each decided that they wanted solid chunks of plain dark chocolate, nothing more.  Slightly stunned I quickly agreed and bought them and their Grandma nice chunks of chocolate.  At this point Mom and Tim turned up and took the boys for a bit.  They were all heading up the hill to search for another one of the military housing spots Mom stayed at as a kid.  Bird and I had the afternoon together, so we shopped and ate lunch at Famous Dave's.  Nothing fosters romance quite like a trash can lid full of food.

In the middle of our lunch we get a call from Mom.  They've finished their search and just heard that Uncle Jim is driving back to Duluth to finish up a few things on his boat so the plan is to meet back at the boat slip to amass everyone.  Uncle Jim lives in Cambridge and works in Becker, Sherry works in downtown Minneapolis, so essentially they each spend hours a day driving to and from work.  So how does he choose to spend the weekend?  Driving between Duluth and Big Sandy Lake...we love you Uncle Jim but as I told you, you're an idiot.  Hanging out back at the shipyard we decide it's time to take out Justin's stitches.  It's been a week and we're not going to make it back to Minneapolis in time to visit the Urgent Care.  So why not here and now? We're in the middle of a rusty boatyard surrounded by dirty, industrial buildings and trains.  Here we can dispose of the stitches by throwing them on the ground and no one will ever know!  Justin, who was apprehensive about letting us do it at first, got into by the last stitch which he promptly pulled out himself.  That'aboy!  Way to man up kid.

The time finally came to head home.  We all had hours of driving ahead of us and were eager to get started back.  As we caravaned out we found our way blocked at a set of tracks by a moving train.  Our eagerness could not be dismayed, this was but an opportunity in disguise.  It was going to be a race to get out of here.  On your marks...