Memorial Day / Bday Weekend

I love having my birthday over the Holiday weekend! It’s such a fun time of year. This year we took a trip up to Lake Superior / Duluth for the weekend. Lake Superior is huge (largest of the Great Lakes) and basically looks like the ocean. It’s crazy that a small town in Minnesota can be a port city that connects up with the Atlantic. We saw tons of boats coming and going all weekend into the ports. We walked along the boardwalk, had fun seeing the lighthouses, went to lots of little shops, ate some good food, and even got some swimming time in the hotel pool.

We are thinking we will rent condos for future trips though—2 kids in a hotel room is hard and doesn’t make for the best sleep! The kids did great at night but had a hard time napping. Also, on Sunday morning Emerson woke up at 5am! Definitely a tired day.

Here we are on Friday, getting ready to go:

It was cold up there! (They call Duluth the air-conditioned city.) But we ventured out anyway on Saturday to the boardwalk and the pier:

At the boardwalk there was a mini-donut boat—yes please.

We stopped in a cool toy shop; check out all the puzzles they had! Love puzzles.

Remember these? I used to call them my magic wands.

Playing in the hotel room. There were 2 pools at the hotel also, which we got good use of! Thank goodness they were indoor pools.

We went to the aquarium of the Great Lakes:

They had a model of the Great Lakes and how all the water flows, along with working locks and dams. I learned so much I’d never known about this area.

Here’s a picture of Duluth. Reminded me a lot of Burlington, VT:

We loved this park:

We got some great food on the trip too! This pizza place was delicious. Pizza Vitta.

Mitch planned a drive up north to see the Split Rock lighthouse, as well as the MN countryside. It was fun to drive along the coast and see how pretty MN is. It was weird to feel like we were driving along the ocean.

Thank goodness for the DVD player in our car. I think Genevieve will enjoy it more when she’s facing forward ;)

Doesn’t this look like the ocean?

On the way back we stopped at the best little restaurant, Betty’s Pies. The pies were amazing! (I also had a really good wild rice burger for lunch. I’m still thinking about how good it was.) We got blackberry peach, five layer chocolate, and then for the road Mitch got a pie shake with a piece of strawberry apple pie blended in. It was delicious.

We had a great trip! We spent my birthday in Minneapolis (it was sure nice to get back to our own beds) shopping with some birthday gift cards and eating some yummy food. I’d say it was a wonderful weekend and Mitch sure did spoil me. The adjustment back to real life this week has been rough!