I love our annual winter trip to the Twin Cities. We're very grateful to John and Mary for allowing us to come along for the ride. It's always great to spend time with Johnny and Kersten and Lizzie and Brian. We really lucked out as far as the weather was concerned. The winter has been extraordinarily mild on the whole and, though some snow was forecasted, we were able to enjoy watching it fall without having it be a travel inconvenience.

Our hotel totally rocked. First of all, the location was amazing - right across the street from the Target Center and adjacent to Kieran's, the Irish Pub where Johnny and Kersten had their rehearsal dinner. Brian and Lizzie, bless them, drove us to and from get-togethers several times during the weekend. I hope it was as "on their way" as they said it was.

The public spaces in the hotel were all intriguingly designed with textured wall sculptures and partitions everywhere. We had drinks in the ground-level lounge of The Bradstreet on arriving. The lounge is low and dark and red - very mysterious. Later in our stay we had a nightcap at Cosmos, the bar on the fourth floor which, strangely, was a required way station for taking the elevators up to the guest rooms. Cosmos has an amazing frosted glass wall that separates it from the 4th floor lobby.

Our room was on the 8th floor and looked out onto an Times-Squarey sort of intersection with huge, lighted advertising signs and bustling traffic. I enjoyed seeing (and photographing) the scene as it changed during the day.

Our main event for Saturday was to visit the Mill City Museum. As the name suggests, the museum explores how Minneapolis was defined by the flour milling industry. The museum occupies a former mill complex and includes the preserved ruins of an earlier structure all but destroyed by fire in 1991. The museum describes itself as the "most explosive museum", referring to the flour dust explosion which destroyed the Washburn "A" mill in 1878.

In addition to a large exhibit space devoted to the history of the complex, the milling process and the variety of consumer products yielded by same, the museum shows a "19-minute" film history of the city and has a fantastic multimedia presentation called the "Flour Tower". The tower is a freight elevator which contains stadium seating for 30 visitors. During the presentation, the elevator shuttles among eight floors, the doors opening to reveal tableaux describing various technical and historical topics connected with the industry. The tableaux come to life with animating equipment, projected multimedia, furniture and props - the scenes are beautifully executed, the projected images integrated perfectly into the settings.

The tower tour ends at the observation deck where one gets a fantastic view of the city, the river and the Stone Arch Bridge. My fear of heights kicked in a bit - the boilerplate floor of the observation level goes right up to floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows. I involuntarily stepped back from the edge more than once. Click here to see a large panorama of the river as seen from the observation level.

Psycho Suzi's (http://www.psychosuzis.com/) was eventually decided on as our lunch destination. We descended into the wonderfully kitschy Tiki dining room and sat in a large booth, surrounded by bamboo partitions, wood-floor-patterned carpet, and high shelves with rows of ornamental ceramic mugs depicting skulls, moai, tiki totems and voodoo fetishes. The food was awesome - I had a coconut drink, a burger smothered in caramelised onions and a mound of tater tots. Heaven.

After a wonderful meal at Johnny and Kersten's on Saturday night, we walked down the street to go bowling in the basement lanes of a neighborhood bar. The bar was one of those wonderful "...that time forgot" kind of places. There were eight lanes (manual scoring) with a long, narrow bar down the far edge. As Johnny observed, it was a wonderfully diverse crowd. I didn't feel nearly as self-conscious as I might have given that it was MY WORST BOWLING NIGHT EVER!!! But let us not dwell on that. Lizzie took a couple of photos in which I look like a 150-year-old, inebriated, westernized sumo wrestler. Those images have been omitted, thank you very much.

The beer and conviviality flowed - we played two games and laughed and chatted. The evening was a blast.