On Vacation in My Own City

One of the reasons I love to have friends and family visit from out of town and stay at our house is that I get to be an explorer at home, re-examining what the Twin Cities has to offer. I love to share the places I go to often and find out what has changed in the neighborhoods I don’t get to much. It’s also fun to do something simply because someone else thought it was a good idea.

When my old grad school friend Alice and her partner Mark drove up from Wichita one recent weekend, I got to be that explorer. First up was going to the St. Paul Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning. I love the Farmer’s Market and, since we cook a lot even when we have guests, wanted to give Alice and Mark the chance to pick out things they liked for dinner. We came home with a lot of veggies, but we also had a great time just experiencing the beauty of a market that was full of freshly-harvested foods and flowers, happy people, and fresh air.

We later strolled down St. Paul’s Grand Avenue, where there are a multitude of restaurants and coffee shops and my favorite, Penzeys, where I buy a lot of my spices. Then we were off to the Target store near my house in Roseville, which was the very first one in the country, opening in 1962. (File that away for your next Trivia night.) We actually did need a few things, but I felt kind of weird standing in the parking lot while Alice took a photo for another friend who loves Target.

Anyway…..our Saturday night fun was thanks to my friends, who are very interested in theater and bought tickets for us to go to the History Theater in downtown St. Paul, We saw Glensheen, a play about Marjorie Caldwell and the Glensheen murders that happened in Duluth in the 1970s. For those of you not from here, Glensheen was a mansion owned by 83-year-old Elisabeth Congdon, one of Minnesota’s richest people at the time, and she was murdered along with her nurse, Velma Pietila. Marjorie Caldwell was Congdon’s adopted daughter, a sociopath with a long, troubled history. The play is based on the book by Jeffrey Hatcher. By the way, it’s a musical comedy with music and lyrics by Chan Poling (you may know of him as a founding member of the Minneapolis band The Suburbs), and it’s a hoot. It would not have occurred to me to go see a musical comedy about a real-life murder, but I’m glad I did.

Sunday found us at CHS Field to watch the St. Paul Saints play baseball. Mick and I love the Saints, so were delighted that Mark is a big baseball fan who wanted to see them play. The game we attended against the Gwinnett Stripers included naming the ball pig for the second half of the season. The ball pig is a real piglet that gets trotted out between innings and there’s always a naming contest for each new pig. This particular “Catcher in the Sty” was christened Joe Sower H.O.G. 24. If you’re in the area and want to watch baseball, there are always the Twins, but the Saints are a whole other experience. Go if you can.

Ah, summer. My houseguests have moved on, but I’m going to keep this vacation state of mind. I’m having too much fun to let it go. If you want to see where else I end up over the summer, come find me on Instagram @kcmickelson.