trip to duluth 2008

So we have this friend, she and her husband are awesome. Sonja and Lars. They for our wedding present bought Catherine and I a one-night stay in a hotel. We went to Duluth this past weekend. Technically the hotel was in Procter. The Americ-inn. It was awesome, we got a king jacuzzi suite. Ok, to tell this story we should start from the beginning of the weekend.

Friday – Started ok, woke up like any other day. That day though I was taking a half-day off work so that I could come home, so Nick (ambers brother in law) could come over and fix the mustang. So I work and I leave at 1:30, which is awesome. Get home about 2 and started some laundry so I could pack for the weekend. Nick comes and he starts on the car. I in the mean time am in the garage working on filling the holes in the sub-box that I got from Tyler. I get done with that, Catherine comes home and we are packing for the weekend. I get curious and go down to talk to Nick, just to see what's happening with it. He gets the pan off and is looking at the filter. He had originally thought that it was the filter and it had fallen off and the tranny lost pressure, which is why it wasn't working at all. We soon found that was not the case. He was going to put it back together because we were not sure that the problem was. Until he was looking at the tranny pan. There was about 1/8 of an inch of metal shavings on the bottom of it. Bad news my tranny is shot. Needs to be rebuilt or replaces. NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. So the weekend was not off to such a good start.

After the last load of laundry is done, I finish packing and we get all set to go out for dinner with Annah, Jeremy, and Brain. We went to Denny's that was good. Then we went back to Brain's for a fire. Not too long and Tyler joined. Kyle eventually came too. We went home, with the intent of going to sleep and waking up early to get on the road up to Duluth. Well that didn't happen as we would have liked it. We got going about 10ish.

Once on the road it was great. The leaves are changing on the way up there and there are a lot of scenic things to look at while driving. We stopped at North Branch outlet mall to see if anything was good. We didn't get anything. Nothing was going on there, except the attack of the ladybugs. Seriously there were at least 2 trillion ladybugs. Yes I counted them. LOL… so any way that sucked, but we got back on the road.

We get up to Duluth and we were going to go to the zoo but they were doing this stupid Halloween thing were there were going to be about a million little kids running around and I didn't want to deal with that. So we didn't go. We went to the boardwalk instead. We went to Grandma's for lunch. There was a 45-minute wait, but there was immediate seating upstairs so we went with that. Big mistake, the upstairs has 1/3 the menu (according to Catherine) so yeah, it was ok but not great. After lunch we went for a walk on the boardwalk. Then it was time to check in at the hotel so we went back to do that. After we check in we get the room all situated, we decide to go for a swim. So we get changed and we head down to the pool. Well we are playing around in the pool and we see a giant hot tube so we got in to that thing. Then there were these strange people that were in the sauna and they came out and got in the hot tub with us. They kept throwing towels in the water. Very strange. So after that we went to dinner at the restaurant attached to the hotel. Awesome, top 5 steaks of my life. Catherine had cedar plank salmon. Which looked very good. After that we went to the gas station and got some snacks and drinks for that night. Then went back to the restaurant but to the bar this time and had a drink. Then we went back the room were we used the jacuzzi and watch some TV. It was very nice end to that day.

In the morning we woke up and went to get the free breakfast that they had. It was badass. They had a waffle maker and cereal, and muffins and bagels and stuff. Best continental breakfast every, well that I've had anyway. After that we cleaned up in the room packed and checked out. We were on the way to Duluth so we could on our cruise. Catherine had pre-booked us on the Vista King boat. That was very cool. They took us out behind a tanker in to lake superior. Then turned around and got a tour of the commercial part of Duluth harbor. We got a lot of cool pictures. After the tour we went to red lobster for lunch. Something about being out on the water made me hungry for seafood. We had shrimp. After finishing up with lunch we went up past st. scholastica, to go shopping at miller hill mall. We wondered around for a while and didn't really buy anything.

For dinner Catherine wanted to go to Pizza Luce. That was good we had wings and pizza. Was pretty good. After dinner we decided to head home. After we got to about Hinckley. That's when things got interesting. So we were just driving a long minding our own business when just up ahead there was this lady and she was speeding up and slowing down, swerving all over the place. Half the time she was driving down the middle of both lanes. So we decided to call it in. Catherine is talking to the state patrol on the phone and this chick in an s10 almost hits someone. We are following this person and the dispatcher has a squad on the way. So a couple minutes later I see this car coming up pretty fast. I move over and it flies past me. Gets right up behind the s10, has to wait for it to do something then pops on the lights. I feel kind of bad, but just kind of for calling it in because we totally just screwed that ladies night up but, she shouldn't have been drinking and driving. We could have saved someone's life by calling it in.

Well that was my weekend. It was a very nice get away with enough things that happened to keep anyone interested. I am putting pictures up on facebook. I would do it here but this post is long enough already.

Matt