Greetings from Minneapolis!

Yay! We are on our third day in the Twin Cities, and I’m really enjoying the place 🙂 The hotel is gorgeous – the Minneapolis Hilton in the Downtown area of the city, with gorgeous rooms, the comfiest bed ever, and lovely views over the city. We are on the 22nd floor facing towards Loring Park, but we can’t quite see it for the massive buildings in front of it. I thought we were high up, but compared to some next to us…
The flights over weren’t too bad – just dull. We were horrendously jet lagged tho when we got here – we arrived at the hotel 4pm local time, and had been travelling for about 17 hours, so we were pretty knackered, but had to stay up to catch up to US time 🙁 We are just about settled now tho. We weren’t quite sure what to do for openers yesterday, so we just had a wander around to find somewhere for breakfast and to have a nosy about. Ended up in a Starbucks, naturally, although I wish we’d had the brains to go into Hell’s Kitchen while there was no queue (we went to try it this morning and ended up leaving because we didn’t have a reservation – something totally new to us for breakfast!). We were pretty surprised that it was so quiet on a Saturday morning, and that shops didn’t open in general till 10am – and place local to us at home would be heaving by 10am! It took us a while to realise that the skyways might be used when it is chilly, hence no jostling on the pavements… We ended up going to the Mall of America and were suitably impressed by its hugeness. We were pretty knackered again by lunchtime though which made it hard to be responsive to the friendly chefs at Tiger Sushi. Poor chefs must have thought us a bit, well, English 🙂 Went to Loring Park, the Sculpture Gardens, and the Walker Art Center while DB was busy yesterday, and had a lovely time wandering around. LOVED the Art Center – I didn’t have enough time to look round the whole place so I’ll go again during the week I think, but all I need say is Rothko and Warhol. Yummy. I was also impressed by the tame squirrels, so after breakfast today, we went to Target and got some critter feed, and took some back to the park. DB was suitably happy and took lots of pics of the happy squirrels who are clearly now our best friends. At one point we had about 30 of them surrounding us happily scoffing away, and one or two were brave enough to eat out of our hands. One even got rather happy and leaned on my fingers while he had a good scoff 😀 Although he did get mixed between monkey nuts and my finger tip, but he did no harm – he just want to pic up something to take with him to eat so it was the lightest nip and didn’t even redden my finger. DB is all excited to go back now, and we’ll wander round the sculpture garden too this time – in fact right now he is wandering around like an impatient child waiting to go, so I’ll sign off with this. His website has some lovely pics of the past couple of days, so go have a nosy – www.daveyp.com/gallery
Incidentally – I’m planning on visiting the yarn shops tomorrow and going back to the Mall for Hello Kitty stuff and Bloomindales goodies for my mum 😀 Can’t wait to see what the US has in yarns for me 😀 YAY!