Cruising Though Minnesota

This morning started with Mass at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis.  Yet another beautiful sanctuary.  The pictures don’t do it justice, of course.  Today will probably be the last day for a while where we have the luxury of walking to a daily Mass at a drop-dead gorgeous church.  We’ve had it good!

After breakfast I had a chance to walk around downtown Minneapolis (in search of the lone Bank of America branch in Minneapolis – there are only three in the entire state!) while Paul was getting cleaned up.  Minneapolis is, well…fine.  Nothing spectacular about it, but nothing offensive, either.  (Well, the city is currently repaving most of downtown and replacing nearly all of the sidewalks – it’s a disaster.  They actually have water trucks driving circuits in the city all day to keep the dust down.  But hopefully that’s not permanent, so I won’t hold it against them.) 

Anyway, the buildings were pretty blah.  Much of downtown is pretty young by our standards – I saw few cool buidings from the turn of the century and it looked like most of the skyscrapers were built in the past 30 years.  In short, none of the charm of Milwaukee and none of the ‘gee whiz’ of Chicago.  The city does have several ‘Wow!’ buildings by current starchitects, but they are smaller buildings (museums, theaters, etc).  We had time to walk through the sculpture garden at the Walker Art Center this morning, which was very nice – basically a very nice urban park with some cool (and some pretty whack) outdoor sculpture.  (Note to Marcia: Walker Art Center is home to the original “Barns I Remember” painting!)

From there we hit the Mall of America.  The epic fail of Paul’s shorts yesterday required an immediate remedy, and if you can’t find what you need at the MOA you’ve got problems.  I thought the theme park in the middle was cool, but other than that it’s just a massive mall.  Nothing to see here, folks.

We opted to skip the interstate this morning and took the scenic route through Minnesota to get to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  It’s been a relaxing and enjoyable ride.  The highlight so far has been the 60 foot tall statue of the Jolly Green Giant in Blue Earth, Minnesota.  Apparently they built the statute to commemorate the completion of Interstate 90, which occurred there (yeah, I don’t get the connection either).  I’m also digging seeing the huge wind farms dotting the landscape out here.  They amaze me!  I hope at some point we get close enough to one of the windmills to hear the “whoosh” as the blades turn.  Watching crop dusters in action has also been cool!

How straight are the roads in Minnesota?  Paul is enjoying seeing how far the GOLF cart will go in “no hands” mode.  Current record: six-tenths of a mile.  However, he considers these results preliminary and continues to perfect his technique.  Stay tuned.