Minneapolis

Nick had to take a work trip to the Great Lakes to visit about 25 of his stores, so Camille and I decided to tag along and visit some places we had never been before. We had a great time and loved seeing places we had never been before. 7 states, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, sort of Indiana (we drove through and stopped at a store, but didn't stay), Michigan, Ohio & Pennsylvania in 2 weeks was a little much for Camille... we decided 1 week was our limit when we are going to be in a new place pretty much every day. I'm going to break up the trip by the major cities we stayed in so it won't be too long of a post.

We started our trip by flying into Minneapolis on Tuesday, the day after we got back from our trip (and 7 hour drive) to Sunriver.

We started out the trip by having Nick drop us off at the Mall of America (biggest shopping mall in America) while he went to his first store. Camille was not too happy about being restrained in the stroller after a 3.5 hour flight :)

 The Lego store... all the decorations were probably at least 10 feet tall and made entirely out of legos. Impressive. Carter would have been in heaven. 

Looking out over the amusement park in the center of the mall

Playing with some legos at the lego store

We decided to take her on the carousel. She wasn't too excited about it at first, but kind of enjoyed it by the end.

She had much more fun playing on the bus

When dada joined us, we took her on a few more rides. She wasn't quite sure about them, but enjoyed herself overall. 

After the mall we grabbed lunch at the 5-8 club just around the corner. We had watched an episode of Man v. Food a while back that had 2 places in Minneapolis that served a "juicy lucy", a burger where they put the cheese in the middle of 2 patties. Nick was sold. Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of the actual juicy lucy, so I'll show you their advertisement, stolen from their website: 

Nick said it was good, but not amazing like Adam (the host of Man v. Food) described it. I reminded him that Adam's job depends on him making food sound irresistible. I, on the other hand had a veggie burger with onion rings in it...pretty dang delicious.

After we got settled in to our hotel, we took a stroll around the city. Down by the river they have a whole bunch of old flour mills, some in better shape than others. 

We ended the night by having Camille get violently ill and throwing up all over all pairs of pajamas, all the sheets we brought for the pack n play and many hotel towels. This was our first real experience of her being sick beyond just a cold and it wasn't a good one. She ended up sleeping with me in bed (and throwing up a few more times) while Nick slept on the couch in the other room. Needless to say none of us got much sleep that night, not the best way to start off a long road trip :(