Minneapolis weekend

Well, Mindy and I made it home from Minneapolis this past weekend. As I had written earlier, we went up for the weekend to see the Redskins take on the Vikings on Sunday night football.

The original plan was to leave early Saturday morning, to avoid the winter storm that was moving into the area. We woke up around 5:30 in the morning Saturday and checked the weather radar for our trip. All conditions were normal at the time in Iowa, but the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area appeared to be getting hammered with snow and ice. Mindy and I talked it over, and decided to head back to bed. We would check things out after a few more hours of sleep and see if it was feasible to leave, or if we should look to leave Sunday morning instead.

We woke up again around 9:30 and made a check of the radar. The front appeared to have moved out of the Metro area, so we decided to give it a shot. We were on the road around 10 am, and really had good driving conditions all the way to Minneapolis. In fact, it took us just 4 1/2 hours to get there.

We spent the rest of the day visiting with family, and around 7:30 met up with Mindy's cousin Doreen. We had made reservations at Osaka, a Japanese steakhouse, in Apple Valley. After being seated, we waited a good 45 minutes before our chef came to the table to start cooking dinner. I guess I should mention that Osaka's is a teppanyaki style restaurant. They cook all your food at your table. The meal was very good, and the show the chef put on was good too. They do a few unique things during dinner. At one point, he took an onion and formed it into a little volcano, and lit it on fire. It was pretty neat to see. There was another time where they take a squeeze bottle filled with Saki, and the squirt it in your mouth from a distance. That was interesting too. We followed Osaka's up with a couple drinks at Rascals before returning to where we were staying.

We slept late the next day, knowing that we would be up for quite a while. We planned to drive home directly after the game Sunday night. Unfortunately, we woke up to a nice snow storm. We were to meet up with Doreen and her husband Steve at 2 pm, but the snow delayed us a bit. by the time we got around and met with them and headed down town, it was 4:30, and by that time there was easily 6 inches of snow on the ground. We took a train downtown, and went to the Hard Rock Cafe for dinner before the game.

We headed to the Metrodome around 6:30 and made our way to our seats. We didn't realize it when we bought the tickets, but our seats were on the very top row, right in front of the Scoreboard. Actually, they were good seats, and we saw a heck of a game as Washington dominated in winning 32-21. The final score made the game seem much closer than it really was. We were out of the dome, and back to Fort Snelling, where we parked, by 11:15. The snow had stopped sometime after the game started, and the roads were not too awful at that point. We drove straight through, and made it home around 4:30 Monday morning.

It was a fun trip, regardless of the weather. Caertainly a trip I am glad I was able to take.