Duluth Travelogue No. 2

This is late, but my memory still serves.

While I may be a geographer and explorer extraordinaire, I haven't actually been to a whole lot of places. There are two chief reasons for this are that 1) I'm young and 2) I'm broke. Even within the state of Minnesota, I am poorly traveled because let's face it, most of this state is uninteresting. However, when someone lives in place X and offers you a means Y of getting there, then fun factor Z increases exponentially. Using this regression, I wound up in Duluth again last weekend.

Why? Because that is where Cha Cha Thibs lives. Her real name is Chelsea Thibodeau, but we call her Cha Cha Thibs because it is embarrassing for her and at the same time amusing to all of us. Liz Scholz and Hannah Lamb are the brains behind that name, so blame them if you wish to blame. Chelsea lives in a nice brick house from whose kitchen window you can see Lake Superior. It is very nautical themed, because her father is a shipping engineer for the big freighters on the Great Lakes.

We arrived by automobile on the Interstate No. 35. The ride up north was relatively uneventful, plus it's been a week so if there were funny little this or thats, I've forgotten them. We arrived in the mid-afternoon and, after getting settled at Chelsea's house, we adjourned to the beach. The weekend before, Andrew, Lea and I had all tried going to the beach on what we learned was "Minnesota Point", a sandbar between the port of Duluth and Lake Superior. However, it was dark and we had no familiarity with the area, so we gave up. Our intent had been to light off fireworks, which we ended up doing on Hawk Ridge, which was ultimately quite cool. Back to the less-distant past though, it was spectacularly windy that day, and we feared that our day at the beach would be ruined. However, it was only windy on the western side of the sandbar, and there was a stand of windbreaks in between the beach and the road, and it was quite pleasant on the eastern side.

Lake Superior is cold. Lake Superior is like a bath with only the cold-water tap on. And then, you add ice cubes. Chelsea, having lived near this frigid aquifer all her life is used to its abnormally shocking temperatures, and was diving in and out of the water like we were in the damn Bahamas. Each and every one of us travelers however was waiting apprehensively on the beach, perhaps hoping a small dwarf star might collide with the lake and warm it a couple of degrees above absolute zero. While all of us did go in above our heads, at first the water was simply numbing. Cold cold cold buggerall cold! Chelsea frequently taunted us for our lack of daring. We in turn thought she was out of her mind.

While on the beach, we decided to play frisbee, but none of us being particularly Olympic with it, we would often toss it too far and it would go straight into the Lake. It was then somebody's responsibility to go and fetch it, and perhaps suffer hypothermia at the same time. Chelsea would usually go get it, calling whoever it had been thrown to a baby or a wuss. Eventually though, this was a good way of testing our mettle and it provided an important lesson in not throwing so hard. A little later on, as we were all on the sand, a little baby boy waddled over and Kaia, who is among the tallest women I know, played with him for a little bit. It was cuter than words can accurately describe. After frisbee and a brisk swim, we were all hungry.

We went to a place called the Brewhouse for dinner, which was reasonably priced, given the current economy, and it brewed its own rootbeer (as well as regular beer, but we couldn't have any of that). Everything was quite tasty, and it was Hannah Longley's birthday, so we all got her a piece of carrot cake. After that, it had started to drizzle, so we looked around the various outing supply stores in the building. My advisor, Dan Trudeau, had told me about this building as being a good example of tourist-driven gentrification. You have an old building which has outlived its usefulness (being a brewery) and you have a city that likes its old buildings and uses them to draw tourists, and you put the two together, find some tenants, and there you have a new use! How novel. After a little bit, the rain had ended and we went and walked down by the beach. It was a rocky beach, with excellent skipping stones. Eric and Nora are excellent skippers. Aaron and I, not so hot.

After that, it was pretty well dark, so we headed back to Cha Cha's to sleep. More later, I have to leave work now. I'll amend this post in a couple of minutes.

Alright, so those several minutes turned into a couple of days. Shoot me. We went home to Chelsea's to digest and to settle in for the night. Some of her friends from home came by and we interacted skittishly, as is natural when strangers through mutual friends meet. To break the ice, we played the game where you put a bunch of people's names into a bowl - either famous people or friends - and you draw a name at random and without looking at it you tape it to your forehead. Then, through asking yes or no questions to a partner, you have to guess who you are, and they have to guess who they are. It can be extremely challenging, especially if you pick something like 'Your mom' or 'Darth Vader'. "Did I kill Obi Wan Kenobi?" is not an obvious starting question. After a few rounds of that, and then some this and that, we all went to bed.

The next morning, we awoke, ate our discount cereal, and headed to the harbor. One of Chelsea's friends works on a tour boat and got us free tickets. The tour lead us around a very windy harbor, and we got to see ore ships, wind turbine stacking yards, and various mills. We also got to see a ship that was a fifth of a mile long. When you think about just how big that is, if stood on end, it would be taller than most skyscrapers. Wowie. Also, at the Duluth Convention Center, there was a dog show going on, and we had fun mudwrestling with the dogs as their owners stood by in horror. Okay, maybe that didn't happen.

After that, we packed up, drove back to the Twin Cities, and that was the end of my second Duluth adventure.