Minnesota Jaunt Day 2

On Wednesday, we had another full day in St. Paul.  Barb is such a good tour guide.  I asked her to take me to a stained glass store so I could get some dichroic glass.  Mom and I are making some glass jewelry and dichroic glass is so pretty and sparkly.  I need another hobby like I need a hole in the head but since there is a large glass kiln in my garage why not use it.  We went to Glass Endeavors where I found some very pretty pieces, so it will be fun to use it.

Next we were off to Artscrap, which is this very cool place where people donate their old art supplies and the store sells them at garage sale prices.  Loved it.  I got some zippers for $,25, some jewelry supplies for $.10 each.  It was a fun place to spend some time and very little money.

At 1 p.m. we headed to a retirement home for Barb to help with a ceramics class.  This is such a cool retirement home, the residents have dogs, the building is gorgeous and they have all these fun rooms, like a sewing room, a library and I'm sure there are other rooms but these were the ones I was interested in.  They even had a cafeteria that was serving fair food for the week.  We stopped for more fried cheese curds.  There were 3 ladies at the class and it only lasted an hour.  Two of the ladies were from the neighborhood and the nun lived at the facility.  One of the ladies was very talented too.

Did I mention Barb is an awesome artist, she works on all these fun and interesting projects with some of her friends and they have an art show every year.  She is a Photoshop wiz and can do great tole painting - she even painted this sweet little stool for my daughter when she was little.  Totally jealous of her artistic ability.

Then we headed to the Como Park Zoo and Conservatory.  This is such a lovely botanical center so I took tons of pictures.  Hope you like them.

It was such a gorgeous place it was worth being hot in the green house.

On the way back to Barb's, she got a call from a friend who had two tickets to the St. Paul Saints minor league baseball game.  What a perfect way to end a wonderful day.  The weather was beautiful and the night was lovely.  We had seats in the top row of the first section on the aisle with tons of legroom right behind the home dugout on the first base line.  It was pretty much a pitchers battle and when we left at the end of the 7th inning it was 1 to nothing Winnipeg.  One strange thing about the game was that people didn't really cheer.  I usually like to yell during a game but it wasn't appropriate at this one.  Sort of odd.  The stadium is pretty new and they had quinoa and black bean lettuce wrap which was probably the healthiest thing I at the whole trip.  Such fun.

Left for home on Thursday at about 7 a.m. thanking Barb profusely for an awesome visit.  She was the perfect hostess.  Picked up mom in Des Moines on the way back and had lunch in Valley Junction at The Tavern.  They make the best onion strings.  I love being retired.