So We Went To MN

It’s been almost a month, and I’ve almost thawed out enough to write this post.

We decided to go to MN for part of winter break. The plan . . . wake up on Christmas Day, open Santa gifts, get in the car and drive 14 hours to Grandma’s house. Nothing we haven’t done before, right?

So Christmas Eve Day we loaded up the Highlander . . . seriously loaded it to the top - not an inch to spare - and put the Snowboards on the rack (we wanted to show the kids how lucky they are to have the Rockies right outside our window by snowboarding down teeny tiny hills on icy snow in frigid MN). Then, we saw that the weather STILL sucked in the Midwest - that whole nasty worst blizzard in 20 years sucky weather. We watched and watched the weather. The Interstate was closed. Bah Humbug!

We get up Christmas morning and have a blast opening gifts . . . then we check the weather. Bah Humbug! The weather is better, but the Interstate is still closed between Grand Island, NE and Omaha, NE. We make an executive decision to wait until Saturday to leave, with hopes that the Interstate will open on Sunday morning. We were bummed and happy - the kids got to play with their new stuff and we got to do whatever we wanted since we had planned on being in the car all day and now had an entire free day!

December 26 - we get up, check the roads - still closed. Check the weather - nice. So we get a room in Kearney and start driving. The Interstate was EMPTY - it was so nice! I-80 was closed between the I-76/I-80 interchange and Cheyenned, and beetween Grand Island and Omaha - so if you didn’t get on from I-76 or hadn’t already been trapped in the open area, you weren’t getting on. We drove over the speed limit on clear dry roads the whole way. Got to Kearney in plenty of time to enjoy the waterpark in the hotel

December 27 - the Interstate opened. We were OFF to MN! Woo hoo! Roads weren’t awful - but not clear. We made pretty good time, all things considered.

December 28-January 4th - we had planned to go sledding with friends, go snowboarding by ourselves, join family for snowboarding on another day, go ice fishing, ride the 4-wheeler, eat/drink/be merry

Then every single friggin’ day we woke up, we saw this temperature . . . and no, it did NOT warm up as the days went on. They set new records for low highs.

There was no snowboarding (dragged all that crap to MN to not use it!). There was no sledding. There was no ice fishing (the snow insulated the ice and made it unsafe to go out on it). There was no 4-wheeling (the snow was so friggin’ deep at Grandma and Grandpa’s that the 4-wheeler just kept getting stuck). The kids played outside in the snow for a total of 7 minutes before they came in frozen to death. You just can’t hang outside very long in those temps.

We even tried to go to the hotel my Mom is the controller for and use the hot tub to at least get out of the house for a while, but the hot tub was closed. Bah Humbug!

The bonus to all of this was that we got to spend LOTS of time with friends talking and playing inside, and we got to spend lots of time Grandma and Grandpa just playing games and having fun. We had a wonderful Christmas celebration on January 1 because it had to be posponed when we got delayed. Had 4 generations of family in the house, which is always awesome Dude and Princess learned how to play Mexican Train Dominos, which is so much fun! We went bowling with Grandma. So ya - it wasn’t a total bust . . . but it was disappointing that we didn’t get to do any of the things we had really planned on doing. But, we’re good improvisors and had fun anyway.

When we left for our drive home on January 5th, the temperature was -27. Brrrrrrr! When we pulled into our driveway 13 hours later at 7:00 p.m., the temperature was 45 degrees.

It’s official. 13 years after leaving MN for the mountains of CO, the Boedies have become cold weather whimps