North by Northwest

At these temperatures, snow is squeaky and it kind of howls when you drive on it.  It doesn't behave like the snow I know -- it doesn't melt one bit. It just moves around and scrunches under your shoes or tires but it is a permanent product, blowing around, whipping itself up into an opaque cloud, filling the air even if it isn't coming down, only going up. We spent the day driving on this substance, or driving through it.  I was luckier in the earliest parts of the drive because the road surface was pretty clear.  Jon's shift was harder. Once again there were accidents to get past, and of course we were on a schedule because we were trying to get to a museum in Minneapolis before it closed.  Jon is a reliable driver in snow, even with 2 wheel drive, so he scrabbled and clawed until we got there.

We arrived at the Mill City Museum at 4 PM, just in time for the very last tour of the huge building (one of 17) that housed a flour milling process from about 1885 to 1965.  Incredible amounts of grain came into this city from all around and it got ground into flour by many different milling companies along the river, using the water power.  For 50 years, Minneapolis produced the most flour in the world.  The museum had this clever way of showing the story -- we sat in a converted cargo elevator and went up and down the many floors of the building, stopping on different levels, listening to the workers telling stories while we saw machines demonstrating, saw bits of movies, holograms moving bags of grain. Very cool.

We went to a gigantic Whole Foods and got more road food provisions.  The cooler in the back of the car is doing an excellent job of keeping everything from freezing.  Our car is one giant pile of chaos because it is too cold when we stop so we don't even try to rearrange stuff. We just keep throwing things over our shoulders into the back seat.  We keep track of Jon's phone for naviigation, my knitting, and the food.

Then we went to a knitting store to get some supplies -- always a pleasure in any city to go to a knitting store where people are always friendly and there is lots of beautiful yarn.  Today I just asked if they had any piles of yarn they were selling at a discount as I have plenty to work with.  We bought some back-up skeins.  

Jon found a restaurant called Haute Dish and the name amused me so much we decided to go.  But to our surprise it ended up being a "pop-up" Chinese restaurant just for this week.  The food was a bit experimental.  Some dishes worked better than others.  We did not go hungry but we were fine that the servings were no bigger.

Now we are at a motel, car plugged in. We have not really figured out how to put pictures into this blog and it will never be gorgeous like Alissa's blog anyway. Jon absolutely HATES this iPad so the photo portion of this blog may be erratic.