Minnesota and Winnipeg 2024_08

  Tuesday September 3rd Today actually has the feeling of ending ... the last day of our holiday, sigh. And yet we woke up in this glorious woodland retreat!   All was quiet as we ventured towards the main building/restaurant.   No children in sight anywhere!! I’m sure they were sleeping just a bit later to get ready for today’s fun.   Honestly, I think they are Italian and spoke little if no English, so maybe their school year is different from ours.   Breakfast was included in our night’s stay. We expected the usual fare we had at previous hotels, but it was in fact more like the Sunday brunch you can get at some of our nicer restaurants, and it looked out over the lake! We even had to sign a bill for our room that was $32 and then underneath, zeroed out. Not sure why they did that except there was a spot for a tip… Back to the room, we packed up for the last time. We were on the second floor with the stairway outside. So if you remember how much “stuff” we to...

  Monday September 2nd   Today was another travel day.   We gathered up our things, then checked out the breakfast bar before leaving. We’ve actually been using one of the hotel luggage carts and filling it with suitcases, cooler, and the purple tote with all our emergency lunch and breakfast supplies. We get some interesting looks but hey, we come prepared! Wow, were there ever a lot of people in the breakfast room!! We were guessing that most of them were on their way home for school or work tomorrow.   But it truly looked like a United Nations with several countries represented. As we rolled our over-loaded cart out to the car, we noticed licence plates from several provinces and states.   No crazy curving roads or steep hills today. We think because it’s the last day of a long weekend, the roads were much busier than they have been for most of our trip. (other than maybe our trip “around” the outskirts of Chicago where traffic is never quiet).   We were...

  Sunday September 1st Are we ready for September?? Not, but here it is anyway…. The weather matches the month today, chilly (14 C), so I guess not swimming weather, lol! Since the Valhalla did not have a free breakfast this morning, and we checked the in-house restaurant yesterday to discover that that breakfast is $20/person plus drinks, tax, and tip.   That was a definite “no.”   Happily we had our emergency breakfast kit (toaster and egg cooker), and Karl managed to convince the restaurant to at least give us some hot water.   So add to that the mysterious campfire sausage that we think is smoked (doesn’t say so on the package) and we had a really good breakfast in our room.   We still have fruit and banana bread from Diana so we are not starving.   We looked around the room before we left.   The Valhalla is a 3.5 star hotel with a conference centre. The front lobby and restaurant look like something out of Norway.   But our room had pen/penci...