I am still finding things to wonder at here in Minnesota. We visited Duluth at the weekend and came across this wonderful statue near Barnum. America seems to have cornered the market on these figures. Almost every place we have visited has its share of enormous pieces of fibreglass. At first I was careful not to ridicule them in front of any US citizens, now I realise that they find them as funny as we do, and see them as a way of competing with each other. You know, ‘Our Paul Bunyan is bigger than yours…’ sort of thing.  I’ve been reliably informed that the Bunyan statue which features in the movie Fargo was actually made for the film. It no longer exists. However if you want to see proof that Paul is available throughout the States for tacky photographs check out the ‘muffler men’ website.

It’s quite hot here so after doing something outdoors in the morning, afternoons are spent indoors (to the air conditioning) and reading books. My youngest seems to have finally discovered how much fun a book can be. He hasn’t shown much interest in Harry Potter but he was so captivated by Eragon that we went out and bought him the sequel Eldest. Since the books are all marked with the phrase ‘The Inheritance Trilogy’ I assumed that it would be a simple visit back to the bookshop for Book 3. Not so fast apparently… The third book has not yet been written or released. What’s that about?

It’s difficult not to pick up the accent here, or at least the intonation. Minnesotans have that American habit of ending many of their sentences on a questioning note? Even when no interrogative is required? It can be annoying but it’s also catching?

Having watched, and loved the movie Fargo we were expecting to pick up some new phrases. My husband swears he heard someone say ‘ Hi there, Ho there, Hey there!’ in the mall, but I think he is making that up. He’s perfecting a whole lot of phrases he (pretends) to hear. His favourite ones are  ‘Hot Dang!’ and ‘Oh jeez’ which he says he heard at the gas station where we buy our bags of ice cubes.

Meanwhile at the grocery store I am trying to find some sort of low calorie juice to give the thirsty boys. Just about everything has loads of sugar in it. I paid $6 for a bottle of Robinsons Orange Barley water which they drank in an afternoon. It seems they don’t do diluting juice in the US apart from this overpriced import. I thought I had hit on a good substitute with low sugar Mountain Dew until we had to peel the youngest off the ceiling. It is crammed full of caffeine. Hot dang!  

We have finally managed to stop eating ice cream and do a bit of sightseeing. It strikes me that America would be a brilliant place for a school trip. So let’s see if I can come up with educational reasons to persuade the powers that be, that such a visit would be beneficial.

 Today we visited St Anthony’s Falls and got a closer look at St Paul’s neighbour, Minneapolis. Our first view of it was dominated by the

 Mill City Museum which combines the ruins of the old mills with some very modern architecture. It seems that Minneapolis was, by the end of the nineteenth century, considered the milling capital of the world. At a certain point it was producing enough flour to make 12 million loaves of bread a day.

At any rate the city certainly is very proud of all this milling around as the Mill Museum illustrates.  In 1878 there was a dramatic flour dust explosion which killed 18 people and wiped out a third of the city’s milling capacity. This is all grist to the Mill City Museum. Here at the museum visitors can ‘re-live’ the spontaneous combustive event. Then they climb the ‘Flour Tower’ and see how water from the Falls powered the enormous operation.

So that covers, history, home economics, chemistry and er… physics. Educational enough for you? 

Explosions aside, it’s hot here. About 25 degrees today and getting hotter. I find myself deliberately walking into lawn sprinklers when we are out for a walk. We don’t meet many walkers. There are lots of joggers, roller skaters and cyclists however and it can be quite dangerous on those sidewalks. Thank goodness the really fast folk stay on the cycle paths. Cycle paths for the psychopaths…

Saint Paul is really lovely. The houses seem to be clad in wooden slats which people paint in lots of different colours. Somehow the sunshine suits them all. Our holiday house is no exception and the picture above is taken from the back entrance.

We are taking it easy. Reading books and wandering just far enough to justify coming back home regularly to air conditioned rooms. I still need a decent cup of tea however, so I went to Walmart today and bought a kettle.

I caught up with an old friend and she took me and Jerry (youngest son) to a park. I couldn’t help noticing how much more child-friendly the city feels. And of course the weather makes any planned trips a lot more likely. It’s really funny wakening up and not worrying if the weather will be good or not.

Temperatures are around 24 or 25 and set to get hotter by the weekend.

Just as well we have discovered the local ice cream – Izzy’s.   

We broke our transatlantic journey with 4 hours in Iceland. Part of the deal with Icelandair was a bus trip from the airport to a local attraction – the blue lagoon. If I’d been organised enough I would have packed our swimsuits in our carry-on luggage, and we could have bobbed around in the lagoon, like all the other tourists. But I wasn’t, so we didn’t.

Iceland was very strange to look at -at least the part we saw. The terrain around the blue lagoon is volcanic, and we had to wade through what looked like the hardened embers of a giant fire. It seemed like the perfect place to film a sci fi movie set in space.

We arrived in Saint Paul last night, and spent our first evening in Minnesota eating pizza and catching up with my brother in law Tony. Tony took me to a large grocery store today and I went round trying to work out what different things actually were. I am determined not to eat like the typical Brit abroad (i.e faux British food). However the challenge of eating American rather confused me -so we settled on buying the ingredients of a stop gap international meal – stir fried chicken.

Question of the day: What do the Americans call the ground floor of a building?

Nevertheless I am determined that I will blog as I go along!

My first project will be to find a way to blog without access to my own computer which will be in storage over the summer. Hopefully I can find out how easy (or difficult) it is to do this.

I also want to keep a log of my summer trip in America.

First area for consideration… air travel. I’ve always disliked it.  Wonder if my experiences with Icelandair are going to be any different?

If you want to comment on my blog -you should click on that post and add your comment there.