Weekend Trip

Well folks, I am back on the blogging circuit...I had been travelling and am now in Minneapolis...Took 4 whole days to get over the jet lag...I guess that happens to all first-time travellers

My first weekend in the US was pretty good...
I spent Saturday at the "Mall of America" which is supposed to be the biggest mall in America. Well the place is HUGE! Frankly I find everything about America really huge...The places, the people, their cars...even the media paints everything larger-than-life!! I picked up a BOSE® Wave Radio/CD II system there: the clarity of sound that small box throws out is amazing...Absolutely awesome!! Well, I could go on and on about it but words just cannot describe the sound! It's worth every one of the 500 bucks I paid for it!

Started off Sunday pretty late...had a morning brunch (a rather peculiar one at that) of cornflakes, bread and a quarter omelette and some tea...and then some chips and some other junk ...
To top that, I made my first try at swimming (if you can call it that) at the apartment pool ...basically, I was just thrashing about at the edge of the pool trying to stay afloat and hanging on to the edge for dear life (I kept going under!!)...Well, it's going to take time. I can see that.

I had done some searching on the net for places to visit around Fridley (The place where my apartment is) and Minneapolis; so we decided not to waste the afternoon lazing at home and to go to a couple of places: Taylors Falls and Still Water. These are towns along the banks of the Mississippi river and are supposed to be quite scenic.

We left for Taylor Falls around 3:00 and reached there around 4:15...checked out a couple of hiking trails in the inter-state park there...One trail in particular was very interesting: Pothole trail...The trail was a self-guided one and had a lot of directions...It is called Pothole trail because of the many potholes (deep pits really! Wonder why they are called potholes??!) that were created by glaciers millenia ago...Did some photography too...Then we checked out the river itself on one of those old paddle boats. These are pretty old: one of them was about 80 years old; it was amazing to see it ship-shape even after all these years!! It was a 30 minute trip and the boat generally makes a small round trip showing people the different rock formations on the river banks and the crew tell you something about the river's history. A good one but not really very scenic as the websites claim...Pretty soothing though.

We got out of Taylors Falls around 6:15 for StillWater...This was the most eventful part of the trip! We had just gotten out of Taylors Falls when an insect got into the car and my roomie Bala who was driving the car tried to push it out. While doing that, the car swerved and we ran into a ditch. Fortunately, it was grassy and fairly wide and deep; so we managed to get out of it without any damage...it was quite a shock and it took quite some time to get our nerve back!! Now that I think about it, we were extremely lucky that ditch didnt have anything in it...Had there been even a small amount of debris, we would have done extensive damage to the car and our selves!

Anyway, then we got to StillWater and spent some time at the river front there...The place is quite pretty and has some jet boats there...We didnt have much time to actually check the place out properly. It was dusk already and we had to get back to Fridley. I took some photos at this place also; unfortunately, I have a film-camera and the roll still has some frames left...so it's going to be some time before I post the photos...

The journey back home was uneventful; we got back home around 8:00 PM...In all it was a satisfying trip...Not the adventurous kind but quite good for a sunny afternoon.

Tomorrow is the beginning of another week...*Sigh* back to work!