A "Big Leagues" day

Sunday the 19th was a special day for us.  We loaded up our bicycles and went to meet David and Valentina at his place in south Minneapolis.  It was just a little over a block until we got to an access to the Midtown Greenway Bike trail, which runs parallel to Lake Street.  We rode west past Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles, then turned north onto a commuter bike route that took us right to the new Twins ballpark.  This was a really "green" way of getting downtown, and parking was free!
We had purchased some tickets through a group from our church; some 64 tickets for this group.  We didn't know everyone, but saw a lot of familiar faces there.  We couldn't see the ballplayers faces though, since we were in the upper 3 rows, in the upper deck of left field.

Since we don't often get to any ballparks, here are pictures to prove we were really at Target Field:

First our parking area -
 

Then, our group in the stands (David, Valentina, and Paige):

Followed by our view of the playing field.

As it happened, it wasn't the Twins' day, as they lost to Oakland, but we came out ahead by biking there, getting to see the new stadium, and earning an ice cream at Sebastion Joe's to make up for all the exercise.

After that "big outing" the rest of our week was somewhat quiet. 

Paige found a website that lists places that have been shown on Food Network's show "Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives", and we've saved it to our favorites, so we can get to more of them.
We got to the Wienery in Minneapolis last year, and have been going to Gordy's in Cloquet for a long time (it was just shown about a month ago), and two days ago we went to the Modern Cafe in NE Mpls.
We plan to get to more of these interesting places all over the country in the future.

Late Sept ALREADY?

OK we know it's been awhile. 
We do expect to update this blog much more frequently, after we hit the road, than we have lately.

So what have we been up to?  Not a lot. 
We are in the process of replacing the oven in the motorhome with more cabinet space.  On the way back to our motorhome storage spot in August, the back up camera quit working.  So we have had quite an education in customer service - or lack thereof.
The RV dealership had our unit for about a month.  It took them half that time to get the oven out and a new range top put in; the other half of the month they got NOTHING done on the back up camera.  Our biggest issue was their lack of feedback to let us know what was happening.  We told them to quit while they were behind, and get it back to us.  Since then we've had a cabinetmaker (friends's son) review what we'd like done, and we've pulled the camera off for replacement.

September started with Labor Day: a very quiet weekend at the cabin up north.  We had dinner with Paige's cousin and his family, plus we taught them a card game called "Hand and Foot".  After the weekend, we met up with an experienced NOMADs couple, Irv and Dorothy Lecy, who have been volunteering for service projects for over 8 years.  They let us know what we can expect later, and also confirmed that "Hand and Foot" is popular at many projects.

Our schedule is coming together for the next 6 months:

• Nov: Bob will be working until Thanksgiving
• Dec: Paige will be woking until Christmas
• we plan to leave MN about New Years (per the countdown clock to the right)
• the middle 2 weeks of Jan we will be in LA, then take a week to get to AZ
• early Feb we will start with Tom' offroad racing in Parker AZ (watching or helping)
• mid-Feb we will be meeting/visiting with a number of  Snowbirds in AZ
• late Feb to mid-Mar we will be doing a service project in Glendale AZ
• later in Mar we will have 3 weeks to ramble across TX
• most of April will find us on another project in East Tx (between Houston and Dallas)
• late April and early May it should be warm enough for us to head north - an IA project
• Most of May will be time off back here in MN for family and friends.
• sometime in June we plan to head north to sightsee around Alaska, spending time with 2 of Paige's uncles.

   Before this gets too long, I will cut it off and promise to update it again soon.