Hi, friends. I’m back from Minnesota and way behind on my blogging. I have this report on my trip, then I have to do a post on the November stamp club meeting and all its cards (Lona took pics with Jeannie’s camera) and then a post on Pam’s workshop this last Saturday. So much to do and so little time! First things first, though.
My sister Betsy was my birthday present (a week late) when I was four. It’s been handy having our birthdays so close and this year, as her present to us, Betsy flew me up to Minnesota for a week’s visit. I was originally supposed to arrive on her birthday, but a week before, she broke a bone in her foot, twice, and in a subsequent fall, broke her tailbone! Ouch! So she changed my ticket to a couple weeks later. She was doing much better by the time I left on the 9th. Weather was gorgeous, sunny and cool, though a bit breezy, the whole time I was there. At the end of this post, I’ll tell you what happened almost as soon as I left!
I was a little too late to see much in the way of Fall colors, but Betsy had this Burning Bush on the corner of her house. By the time I left, it was almost bare, but I got these two pics the day after I arrived.
We did manage to hit up a few stamp stores and I found a nice sweater and hoody, but mostly, we just tooled around. Our first outing was to the National Eagle Center in Wabasha. Here’s a few pics from Slippery’s, where we had lunch right on the Mississippi. This restaurant figured in the Jack Lemon-Walter Matthau movie "Grumpy Old Men." The River rushed by right next to the verandah and I had to go out for a pic of me standing on the Mississippi River. Glad no gust of wind came along to blow me off! Click on any pic to see it larger.
After lunch, we stopped in the eagle center just in time to get these pics!
They brought in three eagles for the lecture. All three had been injured too severely to be reintroduced to the wild, but the Center is very successful healing injured eagles and raptors of all kinds for return to their natural habitat. If you’d like, go to www.nationaleaglecenter.org for more information.
After the Eagles, we stopped off at Lark Toys in Kellogg (www.larktoys.com) , MN, to check out the carousel. In a trip almost 20 years ago, Betsy had taken me to Lark Toys and they were still caring the animals for the carousel and they have since built the canopy and machinery. It’s all finished and Betsy, her friend Barb and I all had a spin.
Here’s an album of my faves of the carousel critters, the flamingo, dragon, troll and giraffe with monkeys on his neck. The moose was not on the carousel, but I love him anyway.
Lark Toys also had quite a collection of nesting dolls:
The next day, Betsy took me (I drove us wherever we went) to the Spam Museum, just down the road from the Hormel factory in Austin, MN. It’s a free museum, full of tongue-in-cheek humor. Here’s Betsy and me with Mr. Spam. Betsy rented a kneely scooter for my visit so she could zip along resting one knee on the scooter. Very cool and much faster and easier than her crutches.
This is a view of the ceiling with a conveyor belt kind of thing loaded with cans of Spam, rolling around like a little train set overhead.
My last full day in Rochester was so nice I didn’t even wear a jacket. I flew out Tuesday afternoon. Friday, it snowed so much heavy, wet snow in Minneapolis, planes were grounded, flights cancelled, power was knocked out to thousands.
Here’s a couple pics I lifted off weather.com.
Very happy to be home before Winter arrived in Minnesota! Thanks for stopping by. I’ll post the club pics and my workshop as soon as I can.
Update: My sister corrected me on my original post. The restaurant in Wabasha is Slippery's, not Jerry's, and the carousel was carved and built in the last twenty years, not restored. Also, she fell on her bum again Sunday night. At least her foot is getting better and she can put weight on it. Such a clutz, my sister is.
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((¸¸.·´*~Kathy.·´*)****¨¨))
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