Yesterday morning I went back to Belmont Center to the offices of Ingram Realty to sign (I almost typed sing… that would have been interesting) my lease and shell out the first month’s rent. I guess that’s all taken care of now. I got that all done fairly early in the morning, so I just decided to head directly to the airport, figuring I might actually pay for the wireless connection to waste 3 hours before my flight.
The layout of roads at Logan is ridiculous. Our shuttle bus from the Blue Line airport station passed within a few feet of the road to Terminal E, but instead we had to loop completely around, hit C and D first, and then come back to E, before it looped around again to get to the station. K-dumb.
Just as I got settled in a corner of the gate area next to a power jack and broke out my laptop, they announced the boarding for a 1:30 flight to Minneapolis. I called my dad to check if he could get me earlier, and got my boarding pass switched to the earlier flight and got on board. It’s nice to have the flexibility of carry-on luggage.
My flight got into MSP almost 30 minutes early, so I had to wait a bit. My dad had to hit downtown first to pick up my sister at work, since we were all heading down to Sioux Falls, SD to visit my Grandma Ward one last time before moving.
In order to avoid a ridiculous backup on 494 westbound (and presumably 169 southbound), we took 35W south out of the city, and cut west later on a smaller state highway. This allowed us to see lovely New Prague, and its newly arrived sprawl. There are huge housing developments going up over 30 minutes south of the outer loop of freeways. Mind-boggling.
We ended up eating dinner in Mankato, MN, about an hour and a half south of the Twin Cities. My sister and I really wanted to try the new Crunchwrap Supreme (hers chicken, mine beef) that Taco Bell has been advertising, so we convinced my dad to drive to the far side of Mankato (from 169).
Leaving town, he thought it would be more efficient to go south and then cut over west later, but we kept running into east-west Blue Earth county roads that wanted to curve north. We eventually reached 169, but after our cutoff onto state highway 60 that joins up with I-90 at Worthington. We just stuck it out, and wound westward to 15, hitting I-90 at Fairmont and not making that nice of a triangle.
Thanks to my early flight, we were still there on time to surprise my grandma a bit, who wasn’t expecting us until much later. And I finally got to sleep in a real bed. More on this little jaunt over the river and through the woods may be forthcoming.
