North Shore - Day 1

As most of you probably know by now, Brice and I take an annual trip up to the north shore of Lake Superior for our anniversary. This place is special to us since it is where we spent our honeymoon and it always reminds me of that newly wedded bliss.

This years trip, to say the least, has been quite eventful. I'll have to split the synopsis of our trip into a few posts since there was so much going on.

Monday morning - we got up as usual, right around 7am when our alarm clock, Karsten, awoke from sleep. Brice got started on breakfast and I got to packing everything we needed. We were out of town by about 10:30am and arrived in Duluth around 1pm. It was raining the entire time we were driving and as we got closer to Dulth, the temperature kept dropping from more than 40 degress to just over freezing. When we stopped for lunch, the side roads were covered in slippery slush.

After lunch, we decided to go to the Great Lakes Aquarium (my favorite place to go) since we couldn't check into our hotel until 4. We decided to go without the stroller for the first time and just let Karsten roam the aquarium freely. He had such a great time! He's always liked fish but he's really starting to understand the fish more. He even tried petting a sturgeon! He was watching Brice and I reach in to touch them so he wanted to as well. Brice helped him over the sturgeon tank, he reached in to touch it and pulled his hand out of there really quickly! He loves the water but I guess he's not a fan of actually touching the fish yet. The aquarium has this big model of all of the great lakes complete with locks. You can put a little boat into Lake Superior, move it through all of the locks to eventually get to the Atlantic Ocean. There was this smaller part that was just the perfect size for Karsten so I gave him a boat to play with....of course, I didn't realize until he was already soaked from the water that there were smocks for the kids to put over their clothes so that exact thing wouldn't happen.

After Karsten wore himself out at the aquarium, we decided it was time to load him back up in the car for the shorter portion of the trip up to Two Harbors. As we left Duluth, we noticed the power lines and the trees along the road caked in ice from all the rain that had fallen. Of course, we thought nothing of it. We arrived at Grand Superior Lodge to check in and there was one light on in the entire lobby and no heat. Come to find out, most of the power from there and farther north was completely out and they didn't know when it would be back on. Parts of the hotel had power but our room was not one of those and it didn't have any heat either. They decided to move us to a suite with a fireplace so we could at least have some heat. We were given candles, flashlights and jugs of water so we could flush the toilet. We realized that most of the room had electricity and we were able to put a movie in to keep Karsen partially occupied but the outlet where the fridge was plugged in wasn't working. We stocked up on ice that they had left over in the restaurant to keep all of the food and milk that we bought in Two Harbors cold. Since there was no electricity for the chef to cook in the restaurant, they had a sandwich bar so we could get something to eat that night. I'd have to say, that was a very interesting experience!

In closing, a few pictures from the aquarium. Can you tell how wet Karsten was?