We left the house at around 10:45 today for some planned errands in the other big city to our east, home of Tousan and the P-Ster. Our first stop was at
Omnium Bike Shop, which is owned by a very nice young man formerly known as Fuzz to the P-ster back when they first became friends in high school. He also used to be one of the bike kids over at County Cycles and knows Mr. Moohoo quite well. Kelsey and I like to quote his all-time best line: "Wait, Gene's your uncle? I love Gene!" We like Dan, although he was not there today - I guess if I were a bike shop owner, I would give myself Saturdays off too. Instead we chatted with our usual guy, Aaron, and got everything we needed. It's an excellent shop.
Next up, a drive into the heart of the monster (aka Downtown) to park our car at Union Depot. The parking experience there is fraught with peril (yes, even more so than a regular parking lot) due to the plethora of pillars:
I was pretty happy that Andy was driving. Yikes. Although at least we were able to pull Felix into one of the extra wide spots. Some of the slightly wider-spaced pillars had two spots in between them. No good.
From there we hopped on the light rail train in front of the Depot to head over to our favorite Vietnamese restaurant,
Que Nha. Unfortunately, it is temporarily closed for renovations (boo) so we had to settle for our second favorite, Ngon Bistro. It's slightly classier (with a liquor license, even) but we just don't like it as much. It sure is pretty though... and the food is always good.
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| I love the ceiling. Also, there were other people there, they were just sitting by the windows. |
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| Funky, local art on the walls that's for sale. |
From there, it was back on the train to Union Depot.
We made one more stop before heading for home. I wanted to check out the construction progress on the new baseball stadium for the St. Paul Saints. It's only a few blocks away from SPUD, after all:
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| I think they're going to be ready in May. |
All in all, it was good way to spend an afternoon - the sun was shining and it wasn't too cold. No complaints. Also, I was pretty reassured that the cats didn't miss us terribly - they were in exactly the same spots we left them in when we got home:
Comments
"The parking experience there is fraught with peril (yes, even more so than a regular parking lot) due to the plethora of pillars)." It includes parking lots being fraught with peril (a favorite true statement), my favorite word--plethora, and alliteration. Yay.
I also really like the photos (including the obligatory cat one) and the little captions under most of them. A most excellent, informative post.