Visit up North

The end of June we took a trip up North to visit with Kim and family. We had a fun packed week. Sarah was finishing swim lessons and Nate was wrapping up fiddle camp. We had night soccer games watching both kiddos. We had lots of time to play with Natalie. Now the slideshows are not going to be in the order of days we were there but that doesn't matter. We had a mission this trip. We took the Barley twist bedroom furniture to Natalie. Natalie's birthday was the 26th and she's the ripe old age of 2, time to get rid of the crib. She was all excited and a big help to Nate and Papa putting the bed together. She is a big helper just about all the time. The famous phrase "I do it" was heard often. As you can see in the slides, she makes jam, empties the dishwasher, digs in the flower bed, a busy little girl.
Claude got to enjoy some views on the river with Captain Steve. Rum River winds through the housing area and Steve had been looking for some time for a boat to accommodate the family on an occasional outing. Looks like they will have some enjoyable days skimming along on the water.

Strawberries were ripe for picking the week we were there. Kim always makes strawberry jam, so one morning before Sarah's swim lessons, all the ladies headed to the strawberry field. We managed to pick about 25 pounds in 30 minutes and still get Sarah and her friend, Abby to swim lessons on time. We had three loaded flats. That's a lot of jam. As it turned out we only needed one flat for jam. Kim made two huge delicious strawberry pies and we still had berries to eat the rest of the week. Natalie sure enjoyed them. As I said before, Nate was finishing fiddle camp and on the last day there was a performance that we all got to go and enjoy.

On Saturday, we all headed to Valley Fair. It's an amusement park with rides for the meek and wild. We split up with the girls going to the milder side and the guys going for the stomach in the throat rides. Claude had a blast as he loves the coaster rides. He couldn't convince Nate to ride some and others they rode over and over. The Wild Thing must have been fun because they rode it 30 times!!!

On Natalie's birthday we went downtown Minneapolis for the day. Our first stop was the Farmer's Market. Since it was a Friday not all the vendors were set up but what was there had plenty of fresh vegetables and the flowers were beautiful. Next stop was the Sculpture Gardens. The gardens opened in 1988, covers 11 acres and houses more than 40 works. My favorite was the fountain-sculpture Spoonbridge and Cherry. The spoon is 52 ft long and the cherry is a mighty 1200 pounds. After the gardens, we were all ready to eat and we went in search of a diner called The Weinry. We had seen it featured on a television show and said the next time we visited Minneapolis we'd look it up. After a lot of searching we found it and after a long wait we got to eat. It was a very small diner with one cook and one waitress, just like on tv. Since I'm not a connoisseur of hot dogs, I'd have to say the french fries were the better of the two.
We finished the day celebrating Natalie's birthday with delicious cake and ice cream.