Fun in the Twin Cities 2022

My son wanted to go see The Spoonbridge and Cherry in Minneapolis. It is an outdoor giant sculpture in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Since we visited over Christmas, the area had a delightful coating of snow. The snow and the holiday season resulted in no one else being there.

Spoonbridge and Cherry

Posing with the sculpture

Hahn/Cock is a blue rooster that looks over the sculpture garden. We didn't get too close because we did not know if it would peck at us! That's the Basilica of St. Mary in the distance, which we sadly did not visit.

Church and bird, a good name for a pub?

The spider-imitating Arikidea is made of steel beams and is eye-catching. I am not sure I would have guessed "spider" if I was positing an inspiration for the work.

Arikidea

We also visited the Mall of America which had Christmas decorations up.

Silver trees!?!

We saw the amusement park but did not ride any rides since we came for lunch. We rode plenty the last time we were here.

Theme park in a mall!

Fun climbing walls

We spent most of our time in the M&M store, which has every sort of color candy and a wide variety of items and accessories to buy including aprons, plush dolls, and ice-cream servers.

Are they cones or bowls?

We also stayed at the Great Wolf Lodge, which I blogged about earlier this month.

Great Wolf Lodge, Minneapolis, MN

On our Christmas visit to Minnesota, we spent a night at the local Great Wolf Lodge. The place is a hotel with a water theme park (indoors), a MagiQuest adventure game, food, and other amenities. The wolf outside was appropriately snowy, considering the sub-zero temperatures.

Do not ask for whom the great wolf howls...

The water park was a blast though we did not get any pictures of us playing. They have six slides, including one massive one that is seven or eight stories tall. The lazy river was relaxing. The wave pool was a little more stimulating and the surf section had too long of a line for me to try it out. The youngest in our group enjoyed the kids play area.

View of the water park from the "Hungry as a Wolf" restaurant

View of the water park from our hotel room

Our hotel room faced the Minnesota skyline, which was far away. Still, it was exciting for our geograph-phile child.

Skyline at day

Skyline at night

We brought our wands from our Williamsburg Great Wolf Lodge adventure and shared one with our cousins. My kids did a lot of running around, interacting with various decorations and screens on the first two floors of the lodge.

Working together

Getting an assignment

Getting an ice arrow

Getting the drop on a dragon

The dragon dropped

The lodge has other activities like a climbing wall, a high ropes course, and a stage with various performances (including a knighting ceremony for anyone who finished the MagiQuest). We did none of those. Maybe if we had stayed longer we'd have done even more. The water park is the star attraction.

Some other kid on the rock wall

High ropes adventure

Maybe we will visit another Great Wolf Lodge in the new year!

Mill City Museum, Minneapolis

We love kid-friendly museums and were happy to discover Mill City Museum in Minneapolis. The museum is built in the ruins of Washburn A Mill, part of the group that would be eventually known as General Mills. The first building was constructed in 1874, but an 1878 explosion destroyed it. Washburn A was rebuilt in 1880. The mill became part of General Mills in 1928 and stayed open until 1965.  A fire gutted the abandoned building in 1991. In 2003 the museum opened.

Mill City Museum entrance

After a quick snack in the cafe (we walked the mile or two from our hotel and had worked up an appetite), we explored the exhibits. The first room was the Rail Corridor with a boxcar from back in 1879. This part of the building was where flour was loaded for shipment across the country.

Rail car 1320

Barrels inside the car

The museum gallery had all sorts of advertisements from the history of the company.

Dough boy stuff

Make your baby healthy!

Malto-Meal sounds lame, but what about Cheerios?

Book tie-in, not movie tie-in

The many faces of Betty Crocker!

Some of the activities were interactive. My youngest and I designed cereal box covers with reusable stickers.

Making an attractive cover

Our brands

A lady was at another station teaching us how wheat was ground into flour, including the various grades of flour (from coarse to fine). My son even ground some!

A personal grinder

Working on his own

Sifting the ground wheat

My turn!

The Flour Tower was an elevator ride to the top of the eight-story mill. Along the way, the elevator stopped and riders heard and saw some of the history of this mill and milling in Minneapolis.

Equipment on the way

The ride ended at the top with an observation deck overlooking the Mississippi River and St. Anthony Falls. There's also a view down to the Ruin Courtyard, which hosts concerts in July and August.

Two happy boys

The mill ruin courtyard

View of the observation deck

View from the observation deck

Looking a little more to the south

The museum had a water lab with some wet and fun experiments. One table had visitors blocking a column of water to see how water pressure can build up.

Under pressure

Another table demonstrated how the local mills used water power. Lots of different mills (including logging mills) used the might Mississippi to power their plants.

Water power demo

Placing mills along the river

The museum had a lot of vintage furnishings from the time, including this stove.

Coal-powered stove

The Baking Lab had visitors see how the flour was used in cooking. They also offered samples of baked goods, so naturally I didn't take any pictures since it was hard enough choosing which was the best piece of cake to take.

We enjoyed the museum and recommend it to visitors.

MN Geocaches 2019

We found a bunch of geocaches in Minnesota during our summer vacation.

320' and 3" Fair was a fun baseball-themed cache, even down to the container for the log. Often a mico-cache is either a film canister (for those who can remember when personal cameras had 35mm film), pill bottle, or other tiny container that can fit a rolled up log sheet and nothing more. This container was very creative and very photogenic.

Looking for the geocache

Posing with the geocache

Where the log is hidden

 I'm pretty sure it's illegal in professional baseball to drill out the middle of your bat and add something inside, but this was perfectly awesome.

We went walking along the Mississippi River and found a cache on the edge. The Ugly is part of a series of caches, so the name isn't really related to the location.

Not an ugly location

The cache was another micro-container hidden away in a creative spot.

We visited South Saint Paul and found a few caches. One classic hide was behind a tire shop. We found Robert Fun 4 almost instantly. We went to lunch nearby. Plenty of restaurants are in the area!

The cache was obvious to us, but not from this picture

We also visited a park in South Saint Paul where we had cached before, probably about ten years ago. Two new caches were added to our finds--Marthaler Park #3 and Marthaler Park #2.

Number 3's location

Number 2's location

The park has a fun playground where the kids played with the grandparents while my wife and I found the caches.

Geocaching is a great summer activity and we were happy to go exploring new and familiar areas in Minnesota.