REAXblog

I woke up in Sioux Falls - at Kyle’s parents place, and set out for Minneapolis. I slept very well. Kyle left to do rounds with his doctor mentor, so I said goodbye to Kyle’s parents as they had already started the garage sale. I headed downtown, but skipped the breakfast join to get coffee then hit the road. Cafe 334 is horrible, don’t ever go there again. Beans not worth living for. I got into the van and headed east on I-90, after redeeming myself with some McDonalds breakfast and coffee.

Soon after crossing the MN border, I stopped at a rest stop to use the restroom. While inside, an assistant offered up a family some free tickets to Valley Fair, a more or less year round fair in the Minneapolis area. We had gone as a family twenty years ago, to see Jimmy Cliff play and go on rides and such, but a thunderstorm cancelled that trip. They didn’t give us our money back either. Anyhow, I tried to finaggle the new tickets myself, as it now cost like $40 a day to do Valley Fair. No luck. I pressed on. I turned off the freeway and started a northeastery trek that would take me to Edina, MN, where my aunt lived. I passed the towns of Windom, Mankato, and some others, all fairly boring. Except a brief stop on a country road to add more oil, I didn’t stop.

I am at the point where I no longer check the oil, I just add more. I know I’m out - I’m always out. I added a quart, executed a quality 16 point U-turn on a 3-meter wide gravel road, and was off again.

I arrived in Minneapolis amid some awful construction on the freeways, and the 2 mile freeway jaunt on 494 took me about half an hour. I pulled off the freeway, up one avenue, took a few rights, and found myself in the parking lot of my aunt’s building. It was an older-style Edge City looking apartment. Surrounded by a boulevard and a garden, maybe out of the 60’s or 70’s, but I had been assured that it was indeed a nice condo. I could say for sure that Van Go was out of place here.

My aunt (Barb) came down and got me and let me in. When I got into the place, it looked like a hotel, but Barb’s unit was pretty nice. It was like an edition of MTV cribs but without the ‘boom boom’ room, and fewer TV’s. Her husband Harjinder was there, along with his neice Gulu, and their son (my cousin) Amar. Gulu had just arrived from Fresno where she had lived for a few years after coming from India, and now she was in Minneapolis looking to start her life here closer to family.

Amar was pretty quiet, which was both a relief and somewhat distressing. Amar has down syndrome and is usually very excited when family members come visit, which can be a bit much for me. So it was nice to talk with him at a slower pace and not have to ramp my energy level up, but at the same time, it didn’t really feel like “him”.

We all ate some cherries, strwaberries, and these crazy german cracker things on the outside deck, talked about this or that. I caught up on e-mail, work, etc, wrote in my blog. We looked at pictures of their other son Sam, who had just finished his masters at Oxford on the Rhodes Scholarship and would be flying in from D.C. later that evening.

I was something like jetlagged, and never really aware of what time it was. We watched the Olympics opening ceremony - very involved, and good, and I got Harjinder to talk more about Cricket, which he loves. I tried to get him to agree to start playing locally, just for fun, but I didn’t think he was up for it.

Sam arrived around 10 pm. He was very dashing looking, in his suit and all. He nearly convinced Harjinder to take a job in the world of politics. It was the first time he had seen his brother in nearly two years. He had dinner, but I can’t remember what it was. I crashed on the couch and that was that for the night.