When you live in Small Town, USA, your travel options by air can be limited, admittedly. To get to an international destination, for example, we need to fly either out of Charlotte (two hours away) or Atlanta (more like three). Leaving our car there at public parking prices is not palatable to me, so I chose to look at more local, or non-international, travel destinations from either Asheville or Greenville Airport. In all, Asheville or Greenville have 50-60 destinations between the two of them, so the pickings seem pretty slim at first glance.

Scanning the flight destinations, I find Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Las Vegas, New York, and shake my head. Nah, been there, done that. Key West, FL is a no, especially in summer. Philadelphia, Boston, Denver, Dallas, zzzzzzzzzz, I’ve been to all of those places multiple times. Keep reading, Worldchump, there’s a place for everybody. Newark. Miami. Minneapolis. Washington, DC. Whoa, back up there.

That Minneapolis bit.

In Winter a hard no, in summer that’s a maybe. I check with Bash, who I decided will be going with me, just so I can get him off the phone for a few days during his summer break. Time for a little salesmanship here. Want to go a Twins game? Noooo. Bash’s yawn over the phone is loud and clear. How about Paisley Park, the estate of the late, great Prince? Naaaah, Bash says with his typical teenager enthusiasm. How about the chain of lakes? Bash doesn’t dignify that with a response. I’ve got it, I snap my fingers. Let’s do a Replacements tour! Now Bash perks up, the old young punk that he is. The Replacements were this bete noire band of the 1980s, who could give you the most brilliant music one day, and then intoxicated, inaudible slurs the next (think Michael Stipe on tranquilizers here), with all musicians trading instruments for added effect. Finally, he okays it, and I book two non-stop tickets to Minneapolis, MN for a three-day weekend. What Bash doesn’t know is that I book two tickets to a Twins game as well. We’ll drop that on him in due time.

On flight day, we leave the car in a public place in Asheville at seven bucks a day…sold! As we expected, the flight is short and smooth, and the airport in Minneapolis is as advertised: user friendly, with affordable public transportation to take us into the city. Bash and I each have a backpack, there’s no mistaking us for anything but tourists, and yet I learn very early that people in Minneapolis will chat you up at any time, anywhere. Where are you from? How long will you be here? Oooooh, comes that long Midwestern drawl then. Nice. Well have fun, then. They are as friendly as they are curious here. This is still the Midwest.

It doesn’t take long to find out that Minneapolis is simply a gorgeous city. Clean streets, traffic is there, but not too bad. And then of course there is the Skyway, the network of walkways that will take you from one building (or block) to the next, designed to keep city dwellers warm during the brutal winters, and cool in the summer, like now. I love the fact that this saves us waiting time at traffic lights, we can go from one place to the next non-stop, if we so choose. Bash and I race a couple of blocks until we overshoot our exit on 4^th Avenue and have to backtrack, laughing like toddlers as we try to push each other aside while we jockey for position on our way down the stairs.

Bash locates a Five Guys downtown, and now he is all-in on the Minneapolis experiment. 

Day One was for simply getting to Minneapolis is one piece, take a quick walk through downtown, then have a nice sit-down dinner. For Day Two, we have other plans. It turns out those plans will change in the most unexpected way.