Vacation Ups and Downs

I like to split my long vacation posts into two posts to cover everything. After getting everyone loaded up Thursday afternoon, we headed over to my friends place in Woodbury to drop off the kids. Upon arriving, my car promptly died. We were bringing both cars over there, so they would have an additional vehicle to transport 5 kids throughout the weekend. So worst case, we had a backup car. I decided that maybe it was just a dead battery, so I quickly bought a new one and threw it in. Car started fine. Okay, problem solved. Nope. We made it as far as Anoka only to have everything electronic die again. Luckily, I quickly exited onto "main street" Anoka, and found a car dealership with a repair shop. They diagnosed my dead alternator. 3 hours and $425 dollars later, we were back on our way up north for our vacation. Not exactly how I wanted to start things out.

The blow was softened slightly when we ate a late dinner around 8pm, and realized we could pick anything off an awesome menu. I went with blackened chicken and lobster and Andrea went with lobster manicotti. We ordered dessert too because why not? It's included!

When we booked our reservation, all they had left were 2 queen beds. On the plus side, there was also 2 bathrooms! The view from our room was nice, but I think I spent a combined 5 minutes sitting out there enjoying it.

Friday was our "free" day to do whatever we felt like. We both got a little exercise in, and I did 14 miles on Paul Bunyan trail. After her run, Andrea got an hour long massage. Then we had a light lunch and just goofed off around the resort for a little while, killing time before catching an afternoon movie. Sadly, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was no longer showing and we were forced to see The Other Guys instead.

Friday night, our dinner was a cookout on the beach. There was live music, lots of free wine tasting, and the food was okay. In hind sight, we would have rather just gone back to the nice restaurant inside, all things considered. I had a few drinks and enough wine tasting to get a nice buzz going.



After dinner, we hit up a chocolate fondue and free beer tasting. A new local brewery, Brainerd Lakes Beer, had just recently become available to the public. They had two beers available, both seemed good to me although I liked the One-Eyed Pike better. Even Andrea liked it, and normally she doesn't like ales.

After a few beers and dessert, there was supposed to be "Wine Bingo" at the resort bar. Andrea headed off to bed and I headed to the bar, ordered a drink and listened to the live music. One of the band members I swear looked just like Napoleon Dynamite. It was too funny... Finally at 10pm, the waitresses started handing out bingo cards. The prize was a ginormous 3 liter bottle of wine. If you've never seen one, trust me, it's huge. I didn't win, but they were going to have games again at 11pm and midnight. I stuck around long enough to rack up a $33 dollar tab and play one more round of bingo, but by then I was wiped and had to hit the sack.

Coming later this week... my reports on running slightly hung over, home beer brewing, wine tasting, and an incredible amount of insanely awesome food.