Aunt Barb and Uncle Steve were kind enough to take Barry and I on a tour of some highlights of the Twin Cities.

We saw Minnehaha Falls, which was roaring from all the rain that had come down in the last few days.

We went to a sculpture garden which included this statue called "Hephaestus." I am a sucker for antiquity so it was my favorite.

The we went to the Skyway downtown. It's a system of covered bridges that connect stores on the second story downtown to allow people to keep off the streets when it's minus twenty in the winter. It is an impressive feat of construction and very cool to walk through. Look how many buildings it connects:

However the area has not recovered from the COVID lockdowns and 2020 riots so it was quite empty:

That area was on the periphery, and eventually we found some other souls. But the IDS, the heart of the system, had something like 40 people around. My tour guides told me that it was still just a shell of its former self.

Being that it was a Monday, seemingly everything was closed. We picked the perfect day for a tour. Many shops in the mall were closed. The Guthrie Theater was closed on Mondays. Many roads were closed, putting us on detour after detour. Nothing to do with Monday, but at a certain point it became hilarious how absolutely everything seemed to be closed.

We went to the Stone Arch Bridge, which overlooks Saint Anthony Falls. Closed for construction. But we could go just far enough to get this view:

There were ruins of the old milling companies which used to drive the economy of Minneapolis back in the 19th century.

Finally, we went to the University of Minnesota. The buildings were mostly brick, like UCLA, and the interiors of the typical showpiece buildings (the theater and the library) were decorated to an extent that institutions haven't lavished on new buildings since the 1920s.

Tired, we returned to Barry's place, ate some toothsome salmon prepared by Terri, talked, and went to bed.

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