Friday, June 16, 2023
Rachel is 45
Jon is 44
Friday morning, I woke up pretty early.1 I decided I should do a little exploring while I waited on Rachel to come meet me for some breakfast on my side of the river2, so I made my way to the second floor of the hotel, where there was a mysterious door that led to nowhere. I found out that, unlike knowhere, "nowhere" was a mall attached to the Skyway system. Since it was a mall and I was in Minnesota, I went to the Caribou and got some coffee. Rachel arrived by foot not long after, and we headed to breakfast at The Buttered Tin, where we sat outside and enjoyed a pretty delicious breakfast.3 After breakfast, we headed straight back to the hotel to do some writing.4 It turns out that the third floor of the St. Paul Doubletree has this great big circular table with two really comfy chairs to hang around in if you feel like blogging about nonsense with your favorite Iowa expat, so that's exactly what we did.
For about two hours.5
It was really fun… See?...
At some point during that time, I grabbed some snack lunch from the restaurant on the first floor of the hotel, and then not long after, we decided to move on to bigger and better things. Rachel wanted to talk a little about digital productivity skills development, so we spent some time setting up a WordPress website for her to play around with and looking at a few other cool tools related to that kind of work. The dinner plan that night was to meet an old friend from her previous job at a Kurdish restaurant called Babani’s, so we made our way over there early that evening. Deeeeelicious. And the company was great, too.
From there, Rachel and her friend completely ditched me and made me walk home alone.6
1#wtfhowtho
2Yes, folks, we had "sides of the river" by Day 2.
3I had the Buttered Tin Hash and Rachel had the Bananas Foster French Toast.
4Not this. We wrote this like a week or so later.
5There were no outlets.
6Just kidding. I volunteered to walk home because I wanted the exercise. I was actually a little worried about fitting in workouts during this trip and wanted to beat myself up about not getting them in, but later realized that I walked a solid 5-7 miles a day and it really didn't matter.