For Thanksgiving I flew from Spokane to Minneapolis on the afternoon of Tuesday the 24th. I figured that as long as I had to fly back through Minneapolis to get back to Detroit, I may as well get off and stay a few days to see my family. 🙂
After a fairly lazy day on Wednesday the 25th at my parents house in Cumberland, we drove out early on Thanksgiving morning to go to Eve’s mom’s place out near Stewart, Minnesota, about a 4-hr drive. We had Thanksgiving there last year with Eve’s family after Aaron’s death, and it seems like our families will continue getting together for Thanksgiving for the foreseeable future. It was nice to see everyone again.
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We were only there for a fairly short time though, about 4-5 hours, because my parents and I had a 5-hour drive ahead of us to their new house near Two Harbors, Minnesota.
Yep, that’s right, my parents’ new house. They’d been looking around for property on Lake Superior for over a year, and there were some places that they liked, but those didn’t work out. Then in late August they found this place near Two Harbors. They looked at it on a Saturday, looked at it again the next day, put an offer down, and on that Monday their offer was accepted (after a counter and counter-counter offer). Everything just fell into place so quickly with that, and I was shocked to hear that Monday morning from my mom that they’d just looked at this place and put an offer down, and then to hear a couple hours later that the deal was done. So they closed on the place at the beginning of October, and have spent every weekend up there since they took possession, moving some stuff up there, but mostly doing some maintenance on the place in preparation for winter. They’ll eventually be moving up there permanently, once the Cumberland place sells. Moving up to a house on Lake Superior has long been a dream of theirs, so it’s exciting that it’s finally happening.
As for the house itself, it’s kind of smallish, at 1500 sq. ft. (the Cumberland house has that much space upstairs alone). There are three bedrooms, two of which are upstairs in the loft, along with one of the two bathrooms, with the upstairs bathroom having a clawfoot tub. And to get to the loft there’s a really cool spiral staircase! The living room and dining room are open, with windows facing the lake (naturally), letting in tons of bright sunshine all day, but especially in the morning. With a big brick chimney and new gas fireplace, it’s a really nice, cozy house. There’s also a smaller guest cabin with a weird floor plan (that 3-inch drop from the living room to the kitchen is a doozy! almost killed myself that first night when my Dad was giving me the tour, haha), which was the original house on the property. The place has a big huge yard that’s mostly flat, and has about 350 feet of lakeshore. Much of it is loose stones, but there is some ledge rock and even some smallish 10-ft cliffs at the northern end of the shore. Pretty cool.
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My parents don’t have internet up there yet or satellite TV, and won’t be getting it until they move up there more permanently. So that’s why I basically just sat around most of Friday and Friday night finishing reading the last half of “Chainfire” by Terry Goodkind. Very relaxing day. It would’ve been nice to hear the waves coming ashore during that time, but it was a tad cold to have the windows open. They do get some local channels from Duluth though, and I have to admit, it was rather amusing to watch the weathercasts. Here are some of the lines I heard from the two on-air meteorologists:
“When the high clouds are overhead the temperature goes up, and when they go away the temperature goes down, so the temperature will be porpoising tonight.”
“Temperatures tonight are a bit cooler in Wisconsin, through no fault of their own.”
“Temperatures are in the 20s across for the region, except for Grand Marais, which is all the way down to the single digits.” [It was 18 in Grand Marais.]
Pretty funny gaffes! I think I’ll be looking forward to the evening news when I visit in the future. 🙂
On Saturday my parents drove me down to the Twin Cities and dropped me off at Alex’s house in Mahtomedi. I spent the evening hanging out with Alex some and playing some rummy and Monopoly with him and his younger siblings. It was a rather early ride to the Minneapolis airport from Alex’s mom though, as Alex’s flight to Chicago took off at 8am and mine to Detroit took off at 8:30am. My friend Kelly, who was in my physics class at Gustavus and is currently a 5th year physics PhD student at Michigan, was nice enough to pick me up at the airport, so we got to catch up a bit and have lunch in Ann Arbor before I picked up my car and drove back to State College (even though Alex left before me, I made it to Ann Arbor before him, go figure). It was an enjoyable two-week trip, but I was glad to be back at my apartment finally.