Thursday: Every road in the state is closed so a road trip will be perfect!

Last week - torrential rains caused flooding in Duluth and the surrounding areas.  Among other things streets fell apart, the polar bear escaped and the seal was swimming down the street.  More importantly, every road in the state was closed as a result.  I exaggerate only slightly.  Here's the statewide map and a close up of Duluth.

I was expecting a pretty horrendous drive up to Thunder Bay for the North American Conference on Social Work and Spirituality.  Turned out that 35 had opened up again and there was only one small detour on the north shore.  And we were the only ones on the road.  The view coming into Duluth was breathtaking.  The rivers run red in northern Minnesota becuase of all the iron in the area.  You could see where the rivers were running into Lake Superior because the water was two entirely different colors.

We stopped a few places along the north shore, once we knew we were out of road closure danger.  Was saw Split Rock Lighthouse, a few rivers that had swelled their banks and created waterfalls and then stopped in Grand Marais.  We celebrated my birthday with a Strawberry Smoothie.  There was this lady behind me who asked me what was in a smoothie (sorry, I'm not sure what they put in them here) got the same thing as me and then said "Thank You" when Barb wished me a happy birthday.

Barb was really nervous for the Canadian border.  I'm not sure why.  I kept giving her a hard time about it.  The last time she'd been out of the country was to Canada in the 1970s before you needed a passport.  As soon as we crossed the border we saw two moose.  I'd never seen a moose before.  (Yes, even after living in Minnesota for 10 years.)  The border crossing ultimately threw both of us off because we also crossed back into the eastern time zone.  WTF?  That made us super later for dinner.  Boo.

The good thing about changing time zones was when the sun was still up at 10pm.  My birthday really was the longest day of the year.