Hill City Cabin

The plan was for me to leave work early on Thursday afternoon and go pick up Adam and the boys at Ingenix, but since I was stuck in meetings and Adam was anxious to get on the road, we ended up meeting each other at the intersection of 101 and I94 in an Arby's parking lot. We spent the whole of Wednesday night packing up the Passat, adorned with the Yakima, so that we could get a jump on the yearly holiday exodus from the Cities.

We have this traveling thing down to a science. We put the boys in what we refer to as "cold storage", watching a variety of children's movies from the Hennepin County Library system. Their favorites are Backyardigans, Dora the Explorer, Diego, Bob the Builder, Reading Rainbow and Bill Nye the Science Guy. Since this is the only time the boys are really given the opportunity to watch movies, they have never really enjoyed interruptions, even for dinner. We've learned through numerous trial and error stops to various Subways that the most successful way to ensure they consume meaningful calories on road trips is to pass pb and j's, some sort of fruit, a gogurt, and crackers into the backseat during the movies. We keep close tabs on liquid consumption to minimize emergent stops along the side of the highway or at gas stations.

A few minutes after turning down the driveway at the 691st street sign off Hwy 169, the boys were out of the car and enjoying the fresh air. With Grandpa, the boys found a turtle friend, and within minutes of deciding she should go back home to the lake, the boys were also wading in the water, searching for shell treasures.

Adam and I love it up here...and we know the boys do too.