After breakfast on Thursday we said goodbye to our lovely hosts, Ellen and Peter, who were heading north for a board meeting at Ellen’s old college. We are looking forward to seeing them in Denmark in the future.
We spend the morning exploring one of Minneapolis’s BIG tourist attractions, Mall of America, the largest shopping mall in the States. It’s so big that there’s an amusement park with rollercoasters etc. inside it!
From there we went to Harriet Island in the middle of the Mississippi to go on a so-called Margaritas Cruise. There was a lot of roadwork and closed streets in the Twin Cities – already in the morning we had had to take a detour because the governor lived nearby, and his street was closed, because they were afraid of unrest because of the recent shootings. And today there was a memorial service for one of the victims in the huge St Paul cathedral, so we had been warned not to go near that area as it would probably get very crowded.
The tour boat we got on looked like an old paddle steamer, but no longer had a working paddle wheel. We went up and down the brown Mississippi river while we sipped our margaritas and snacked on tacos and guacamole, and the green river banks made us almost forget that we were in the middle of a big city.