Anniversary Escape!

This past week I was spending 8:30-4:00 every day at the District Office taking a reading class.  Some days were more interesting and exciting than others.  One day I sent Nick an email (yes, during class, shame on me) and asked when his mom (who was our babysitter for the week) was planning on leaving, for The Spot was having trivia night on Friday.  His reply was he wasn't sure when he was going to tell me but she was going to leave Saturday afternoon when we got back from Duluth, he had booked a hotel room for us a few weeks ago!  It turns out he emailed one of my classmates (a Title One teacher in the district) to find out if Friday would be a good day to go, and then made reservations for us at a hotel in Canal Park in Duluth for our anniversary!  What a fantastic way to end a long week - and believe it or not, my first night away from Lilly ever!

We left Friday after my class ended, about 3:00 and watched the temperature drop from the mid-80s to the mid-50s.  We had dinner at a great brew pub, Canal Park Brewery and watched the lake as we enjoyed delicious food.

After dinner we walked toward the Canal Park Bridge.  As we were approaching the drawbridge was lifting to let a giant ship come through. Nick loves ships.  So his weekend was totally made.

We watched the Philip R. Clarke ship leave Duluth and then started wandering back toward the hotel.  On our way back we swung into the Maritime Visitor Center.  Unfortunately I realized on our way out of town that I forgot a fleece or long sleeve or jacket of any kind.  We wanted to leave before Lilly woke up from her nap, so I said I could be tough and fine without a jacket.  Not so once we got to Duluth.  As you can see it was not at all sunny, it was quite cold, windy, and it also was raining at times.   While Nick was enamored with the Maritime Visitor Center, I was only mildly interested.  So while he absorbed fact upon fact from the displays, I braved the pouring rain to find a cheap sweatshirt from one of the tourist shops.  A very nice parking cop offered to get me a poncho - he was quite adamant that I let him get me one, but I won and walked on to the stores.  I found a UMD Hockey sweatshirt on sale for $19.99 and then met Nick back at the Maritime Center.

Another ship was scheduled to come through between 7:30-8:30, so we were debating whether or not we'd stay to see it.  We figured why not, it was too late to do much of anything else.  We walked through the remaining areas Nick hadn't seen yet, and learned just how they load and unload the ships.  Modern ships have conveyor belts on the bottom that they use to unload whatever is filling the ship.  While waiting we also learned that the ship that was just hanging out just outside the canal was waiting on grain and parking is free on Lake Superior, whereas it costs ships thousands a day at dock.

We went back to the hotel, freezing cold, but had a nice walk along the lake front.  After a glorious full night of sleep, we woke up after nine.  Had some free breakfast while looking at the lake, which was so covered in fog we couldn't really even see it.  

Not sure what to do after check out, we walked around Canal Park.  We walked toward the aquarium and saw this group of geese.  Both of us took a hand at counting and got to 41 baby geese.

Neither of us has ever seen anything like it.  There were five adults and then the 41 kids.  My guess is a school field trip.

Not sure what else to do, we decided to tour the William Irvin, an ore ship that has been taken out of the running and is now a tourist destination.  Unfortunately it was a guided tour and the tour didn't start until noon.  We hemmed and hawed after buying our tickets at 11:40 - we told Dianne we'd be back by three so she could get home around six.  I'm not super interested in ships, but I'd learn some things.  After a phone call to Nick's mom checking that she didn't mind us running a bit late, we got a vanilla latte for me and headed back on the tour.  I'm really glad we did.  It was actually really interesting and I learned a lot, and we had a pretty decent tour guide.  And kids on our tour group did really well.    Of course I didn't take many pictures (one woman in our tour group took thousands, including a picture of a picture of William Irvin, the ship's namesake - a photo that I am guessing would not have happened in the ages of actual film).  Nick's hip did remarkably well with the 18 super steep stairways (called ladders by the way) and all the uneven surfaces.  

Here's the first stairway to get on the 32 foot high ship:

These steps are completely and utterly tame compared to the ladders on the ship.

Things we learned:

• there are over 600,000 rivets on the ship (not the 1,500 one of the kiddos guessed)
• there was a crew of 32 men
• they had tiny beds and cabins for sleeping
• the food was actually pretty delicious and was available to them 24 hours/day - in fact many sailors put on weight
• they worked on the lakes for seven days, had a day or two back at home and then left for another seven day shift
• on wavy days they'd put a wet table cloth down on the table to keep their plates from sliding away
• they had a deep fryer in the kitchen
• there were roughly 70 large wing nuts (bows) per loading hatch and 16 loading hatches (weighing thousands of pounds each) for a total of 1120 nuts that had to be screwed on and off by hand for loading and unloading 
• its maximum speed was 12.5 mph
• the rear anchor was 6000 pounds and the two bow anchors were 8000 pounds each
• they bring guests along for wining and dining those high up in the industry or potential clients (and they still do this). The guest lounge had a button they could push when they ran out of ice for the porter to bring them ice. That is the sole purpose of that button.

There are other things we learned but we figure this is enough to share with you now.  In October they turn the cargo hold of the ship into a haunted maze and we can promise you it will be creepy.

A slightly crooked picture from the back of the bow of the ship down at the rest of it.  All those raised parts are the hatches.  It was clearly still very foggy at 1:00 in the afternoon.

After the tour we had a delicious lunch and had conversations all weekend from start to end, with no interruptions from a toddler.  Then back to our hotel parking lot to get the car and hope that the wheel didn't fall off on our drive back.  It didn't, although it did make the scary rattling sound at slow speeds but not on the highway.  We also watched the temperature go from 50 degrees to 90 degrees.

Lilly was excited to see us but made sure she let us know that one of the first things she wanted us to do was fix the slide that was in the van.  She did perfectly with Grandma while we were away - slept better for her than she does for us.  Grandma darted off pretty much as soon as we got home (and gave us the tutorial on Lilly's carseat that is now finally forward facing!!!).  The rest of the evening was soaking up time with our Lilly.

This is how Lilly watches World Cup soccer - by playing her own game.

Using her binoculars to check out the new slide (a free slide from
a woman in my reading class.  we need to fasten it to something, which is what Lilly
meant by asking us to fix it)