Saturday, June 17, 2023
Rachel is 45
Jon is 44

Late Friday night, Rachel had texted with a last-minute breakfast suggestion: Hope Breakfast Bar. So the following morning, I walked down there to meet her.¹ I got there a little early and settled into a nice indoor spot just inside the door. After scouring the menu, we decided to share two dishes:² the Blackened Cauliflower and Fried Egg, and the Pillow Pancakes, with their signature cream cheese maple syrup. We did not get a t-shirt, even though Jon really wanted one… the staff had hogged them all.

After breakfast, we were nowhere near the hotel. This was a "good problem". Because it meant a day of serially walking, sweating, talking, complaining about the sweat, cooling down from the sweat, and then going back out in the heat again to sweat some more. That might not sound fun, but then again, you might not have hung out with Rachel Bachmann for the day. We wandered in a direction that was roughly back to the hotel, but that she believed would take us near a cathedral and the state capitol building, both of which seemed interesting enough to sweat my Goddamn brains out to go visit. Again: Rachel Bachmann. 

So anyway, we ended up at The Gnome Craft Pub. What a great place! The guy behind the bar was super friendly, the bathrooms were really clean, the beer was tasty, and Norway was playing Scotland.³

Aaaannnyyyywwaaaayyyy… we got pretty toasted at that bar and finally decided the responsible move was to walk back to the hotel. On the way back, we passed that cathedral, so we toured the inside for a bit and lit some candles.^{4 5}

After the Cathedral, we figured "hey, we've been walking around in the heat and we're miserable, so let's walk around in the heat some more!". So we wandered slightly north and found the Capitol Building. On the way there, we saw a really cool memorial display: The "Spiral for Justice", which featured an inward-spiraling sequence of pillars that became shorter and shorter towards the middle, which we presumed to signify the initial barriers to voting equality, but also showed that perseverance could lead to progress. We then continued on into the Capitol Building, where… OH MY GOD, they had air conditioning, you guys. And bathrooms. It was magical. We also got to see where they pass important laws.

Finally, after what seemed like hours of walking around town,⁶ we figured "hey, it's been a minute since we had liquor", so we decided to walk over to Vault Liquors for supplies. Jon got some Toki Suntory Japanese Whisky because he felt an intense need to pay homage to Lost in Translation.⁷ Rachel got some red wine.

We got back to the hotel, planning to use a Google Chromecast device to watch some research-relevant movies, but encountered a technical glitch. For whatever reason, the Chromecast wasn't connecting to the hotel internet. We spent the next hour or so walking around the corner to Walgreens to look for an HDMI cable instead, but had no luck.⁸ When we got back to the hotel, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the Chromecast was working okay after all.

So obviously, considering the point of the blog post we were working on,⁹ we stayed up and watched When Harry Met Sally and drank an undisclosed amount of that liquor we had bought that evening. After 10:00pm, we realized we were ravenous, and tried to get dinner at the hotel bar. When we found out from the surly bartender that the kitchen closed at 10:00pm¹⁰, we got up to leave in disappointment. In a truly Minnesota Nice moment, the guy at the end of the bar who had overheard the exchange flagged us down and gave us a couple of options of places nearby that might still have food. Thus, we ended up at the Amsterdam XXX Bar, a place we had passed earlier and speculated wildly about.¹¹ Surprisingly good, and not a strip club at all. 

We took our dinner back to the hotel and scarfed it down, and then I put Rachel in a Lyft home.