Valentine's Day

This past weekend. The first opportunity Sharon & I have had to get away for the evening since before the actual Valentine's Day. In one sense, it's not as bad as it sounds. I've had the opportunity to be away many nights for theatre-related stuff, and once to hang out with a friend. And Sharon has been taking a weekly Pilates class, and just last week attended workshop on rain gardens.

But a chance to get away together - ah, there's the rub. It had all the makings of an evening for which our sights were set way too high...

We'd planned to go down to the West Bank (University of Minnesota West Bank), see eat Indian food, then see a play. We got down there and got Indian food in our bellies all right, but both realized we were so exhausted we were going to be battling sleep if we tried to sit through any sort of two-hour form of passive entertainment. It was sunny & cheery out (still only 6:30 or so by that time), and since we were only a couple of blocks from crossing over 35W (and two blocks south of the historic bridge collapse), I suggested we do a river walk down one side of the Mississippi, cross the Stone Arch Bridge , and back up the other side to check out the reconstruction efforts for the I35W bridge.

It ended up being a glorious two hour walk, with a lot of new redevelopment sights to see with in the Guthrie Theatre area. We were down there last year to go to a nearby farmer's market, but didn't get upstream & downstream quite so far. It's quite an amazing little area of riverfront; something Minneapolis should be quite proud of, and something I'd recommend to visitors to my city. You could definitely spend a whole day just wandering down along one side of the river and up the other, if you really took time to digest the various pieces of history and maybe took in an attraction such as the Mill City Museum.

As it was, the only couple of places we stopped were once on the Stone Arch Bridge (recent days of heavy rainfall had made for a spectacularly powerful St. Anthony Falls, with huge, white, rolling waves and a fine mist drifting down from the falls at least a half mile or so), and on the Cedar Ave Bridge for views of the construction. If you haven't checked up links thus far, do check out the first one, above, to see our proximity to I35W. Literally, you're a hundred or so feet over from all the work, and it was quite a sight to see. This massive concrete columns where shifts of workers are toiling 24 hours a day to create a marvel of first-world civil engineering. They're not going to screw this bridge up.

Anyway - they have actually created a pedestrian & bike lane over Cedar Ave, where I do not believe there was one before - just to accomodate folks wanting to get a look at the work, replete with historic marker-type signs indicating exactly what's going on. Stuff like the fact that this bridge is going to have one arch that spans the entire 504 feet of the river (no columns in the water!), and in the arch during that stretch, there will be 150 row beam segments, each weighing between 150 and 200 tons. Cool, mind-blowing stuff like that.

After the bridge, we headed over to the Freight House for coffee & a treat, where we hung out for a couple of hours. It's worth noting that there was a really cool series of paintings there by a guy named (I think) Alex Pederson. Unfortunately, I can't find anything out about him on the web. But the whole series depicted Sasquatch in various settings in and around Minneapolis, and were all really well done. T-Clog would have loved it.

Anyway - though we remained sleepy at the conclusion of the evening, our batteries were charged.