And etc…

Last weekend Matt and I drove up to Duluth. When we left Stone Lake it was about 75 degrees outside and partly sunny, or partly cloudy depending upon your optimism/pessimism outlook. About an hour later, as we saw a sign for Superior, Wisconsin, we noticed that there was a decided fog settling in, or actually, already quite settled in and living happily. Then we went to McDonald’s for lunch (because, hey, why not?) and noticed that it was about 45 degrees there. Quite cold. But hey, we’re thinking, it’s morning, I’m sure the sun’ll come out and burn this fog off and warm up the place. 15 minutes and one dramatically-spilled container of buffalo sauce later, it was still cold and visibility was about, well, I’m not a meteorologist. Visibility was not far.

So off we drive to Duluth. We apparently crossed over Lake Superior (or a river off of it) on the way there, but we couldn’t really tell because except for the bridge railings, the road, and the cars in front of us, everything was very, very white. It was rather surreal, like a scene from The Matrix or possibly The Jetsons.

We went to the Lake Superior Zoo because I had never been to a zoo. There were about 30 people there, I estimate. 20 of these people were very small children. I’ve noticed recently that small children aren’t really annoying, it’s their parents who keep yelling at them who are annoying. I’m not going to comment further on this to avoid possibly becoming amazingly hypocritical. I don’t have children so my views on the fact that it’s probably just fine to dance around in the middle of a zoo are not entirely relevant. It’s also okay, in my opinion, to feed the llama and then scratch your arm. But hey, who am I to comment on this? There are probably a bazillion diseases that zoo-enclosed llamas carry.

Later at the zoo we saw some cougars participating in spring-like behavior. They were polite enough to wait until the small children had passed on to the next exhibit before engaging in said behavior. (In a related note, the lions also did this, as well as two dragonflies we encountered yesterday, which was kind of creepy.)

After finishing our zoo adventure we drove to Lake Superior, or rather, the area around the Lake that sells stuff and has museums and such. Matt assures me that Lake Superior does in fact exist, but due to intensely foggy conditions I cannot verify this as fact. I’m thinking that perhaps Carmen Sandiego got there before us and stole the lake. Those gumshoes better get on that; pretty soon people are going to start to notice a missing lake.

We concluded our Saturday with a trip to the Duluth Target because it’s one of the closest Targets to our summer home. While we were perusing the aisles Matt forgot what town we were in because Target is Target. It’s about the same everywhere. We bought a compass for the drive home and discovered that when I’m holding it the compass doesn’t actually work. This may have to do with my incredible lack of direction, but this is also unverified.

So I decided that Duluth is a nice place, even though I didn’t actually see most of it because of the fog-like haze surrounding it. In fact, it was like I wasn’t actually there, but instead experienced it in a rather vivid, though hazy, dream.