Chapter 22: This Time John Wayne Does Not Walk Off Into The Sunset With Grace Kelly.
That was Gary Cooper, a******
I’m not allowed to print the response to that line.
Ehhh…
Just a little redaction and it’s all good.
Anyway, it’s time to wrap up this TR with our final day in the Midwest. It began with yet another edition of Sleeping With A Toddler, in which Dave got perhaps the worst luck of them all.
Taking one for the team
After a hearty, relaxed Embassy Suites breakfast while we waited out rush hour
You chose free food over rush hour traffic?
I’m shocked.
we went downtown to the St. Anthony Falls area of the Mississippi River. This is a man-made dam the provided hydroelectric power to the city as well as a lock that allowed ships to traverse some rapids in the river. Now it’s a nice little dam riverfront park and was the temporary dam home of the Mississippi National River visitor center while their main building was under renovation.
And as with every opportunity to view a dam or anything related to a dam this particular dam was instrumental in providing the dad in this trip with multiple chances to tell some dam jokes and then to strategically pepper his prose with dam descriptions and frequent use of the ever important dam noun.
A very useful dam indeed…
And yes, we came here mostly to pick up another cheap National Park passport stamp.
But of course, dam park passport stamps are just as valid a collectable and non-dam park passport stamps (if not more so).
I’d say we were there maybe about 15 minutes or so. Long enough to get our stamp and enjoy the view.
Quality over quantity
At this point in the trip, we were all pretty tired and grumpy and I seem to remember having one of those stupid married couple fights over nothing
Nothing to see here folks!
You can go about your business.
we thought it would be a nice spot to let Drew run around and see the animals after having been cooped up in the van for most of the previous two weeks.
See…
You are pretty smart.
I knew the things that everyone else was saying were just idle talk.
The zoo turned out to be fairly large and a nice place to visit, especially for a place with free admission. Along with gorillas, lions, and wolves, they had a special arctic exhibit featuring sea lions and penguins.
Free is a very fine price.
And you constructed that sentence in such a way as to prevent the inevitable “oh my” responses.
Nicely done.
They even had a periodic sea lion show.
For now…
This guy had heard about our troubles flying out to Minneapolis and bet us he could beat us back to Baltimore. As you can see, he had a head start.
If you hurry, you may still have a chance to catch up
We thought this sign, posted on a rickety wire fence leaning at an angle 25 feet over the lion cage, was extraordinarily helpful:
It’s like the signage on electric fencing…
Not so much a warning as a challenge.
For some of us, that is…
It was somewhere around the lion that we pulled off our last DiS Meet of the vacation. We got together with Karin (
@MNtwinsplus1mom ) and her three boys, Sam, Kevin and Benji.
Very cool.
You have met the nicest folks on you travels.
So far…
We found that, similar to Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Como Park has an animatronic sleeping polar bear on display for visitors.
So do they have to pay royalties back to Imagineering?
Just one more profit center in the WED Company coffers.
After some quick sandwiches to use up the rest of our supplies, we went inside the conservatory. Karin was nice enough to take a photo of the family and got this one, which turned out to be one of the better family shots of the trip despite Drew picking his nose.
No…
That’s the bit that makes it a perfect family shot.
It was a hot summer day, and eventually we got tired of the non-air-conditioned conservatory building, so we took refuge in the conveniently air-conditioned gift shop for a bit before moving on.
And I wonder if they have to pay Disney royalties on that design feature as well?
Our next stop was in downtown St. Paul, where we found the Minnesota History Center. It just so happened to be a Tuesday afternoon, and it just so happened that the museum offered free admission on Tuesdays after 3:00 p.m. And wouldn’t you know it? It just so happened to be 3:00 p.m.
Almost as if you planed it out that way.
Now there was an additional benefit that I hadn’t quite planned out, but instead proved to be a happy accident: there was a special traveling exhibit showcasing the work of one of the great artists of our time. I know, Picasso has his fans. So does Salvador Dali. You might prefer the more traditional work of Norman Rockwell or the more out-there stylings of Andy Warhol. But for my money, one man’s creative genius surpasses them all. That man is the immortal Chuck Jones.
One of my heroes.
Between him and McKimson the world will always be graced by truly fine entertainment and comedic timing.
Seriously, try watching the Bugs/Daffy episode “Duck Amuck” while keeping a straight face. Impossible. It’s lunacy at its finest.
Dang!
The link doesn’t work for me.
Not a problem though…
I’ll just plug in my DVD collection of the complete works of WB animation when I get home and laugh at it then.
Be vewy quiet. I’m hunting wabbits.
“A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a”
(or however you’d go about correctly spelling that).
I had hoped this would be our Christmas card shot. And it did end up making it as part of a collage.
Because… anvils!
Here’s the whole crew with Karin and her boys. We were really having a lot of fun hanging out with them.
There’s the rest of that baseball team.
Time to go on the road.
They finally had to drag me away from the Looney Tunes clips
And I am certain this is not a metaphorical description of what actually occurred.
After donning the appropriate headgear, the kids went into a cave where they could load “dynamite” into strategically-placed holes in the rock, and then move back to push a “detonator” in the style of a Wile E. Coyote-style plunger, and then set off “explosions”.
Suuu-per… geeeeee-nius…
Museum security had to pull us away after several hours of simulated explosions and maniacal laughter.
And I am certain this is also not a metaphorical description…
It was here that Kevin and Benji proudly showed off the third-best museum exhibit of all time (second was the U-boat in Chicago’s Science & Industry Museum).
Simi-related (but not really) side note…
One of the better museum experiences I’ve run across was at Nauticus up in Norfolk and involved having to design, build and test your own submersible on the fly and then use it to retrieve sunken artifacts from a sizable fresh water tank.
That was a lot of fun.
Actually there were a bunch of really cool interactive exhibits there aside from the historical stuff.
(and there’s another TR I should have finished.)
It was kind of scary how efficient they were at building bombs. Clearly, they had all practiced this somewhere before.
Have you inspected you home’s attic space recently?
Even better, we were able to find an authentic hand-painted Chuck Jones cel in the gift shop as a Christmas gift for Sarah, our budding Imagineer.
Now that’s just down right cool!
Our final stop of the vacation was for dinner at the 5-8 Club south of the city. This is one of the homes of the “Juicy Lucy”
‘Nuf said…
It’s on the list.
Drew demonstrated the effects of spending two weeks strapped into a car seat.
Or was this just a natural reaction to something that dad said?
We stopped for dinner at Mission BBQ, a military-themed joint I’d discovered while at a business conference in Annapolis, Maryland. It’s a chain, but it’s a very good chain.
So long as it’s a good chain.
Which generally nullifies even the black mark denoted by the word “chain”.
Cutting out the middle man, I see.
...are any of you interested in a TR for our spring break trip to Texas and New Mexico?
Is this even a question!!!!