Weekend Away (Here)

Though Beatrix gets lots of long weekends from school (this one was for conferences, in which she did very well, thank you), we are always bad at planning getaways during them. There always seems to be some obligation we have here (usually my work, sigh) that keeps us from being able to go.

But this weekend, even here, we were able to do a few "bucket list" items!

The "corpse flower" at the U of M greenhouse started blooming on Thursday. It only blooms every 3-10 years (we were told the one here is on the frequent end of that cycle), but I had never made it over to see it. Patrick is very smell-sensitive, but we watched some live cam feed of it and psyched himself up, so after meetings on Friday afternoon we headed over.

The flower itself had bloomed for less time than expected, so it was somewhat deflated, even in less than 24 hours. But that was good news for Patrick, because the smell (which really was like rotting meat) was contained. It really was cool to see, and the rest of the greenhouses were kind of interesting as well.



After that, we headed over to our friends' B and B, The New Victorian Bed and Breakfast. We pretended we were staying there for the night to take these pictures. The place is really a dream come true — you should all consider staying there, and if you tell them you are our friends I've been told you'll get the VIP treatment. Just look at these spaces!

(and, when we picked up B the next morning we got a sneak peek of the breakfast — AMAZING!)




While B stayed with our friends, we got out to a great dinner at Bar Brigade for their 2nd anniversary, and then, as always, to Lawless....

Late last night, after dinner with friends, we decided we should head out and look for the Northern Lights. I would call that experiences mixed — we drove out to Marine ("the answer is always Marine), and eventually found ourself in an open field outside of Jackson Meadow, looking up at the sky and smelling the pines and the cool night air. There were bright stars, and streaks in the sky that were not the gorgeous, green and purple ones you see in pictures, but certainly white, undulating, ghost-like images in the sky (plus a few con trails from planes). This article spells out why pretty clearly. So even though they were not the amazing experience you dream of seeing, it was still pretty cool — and I got to cross of a few bucket list items in one weekend!













Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Race?

New Year's Eve 2023

Desk Set