Trip to Indiana: Homeward Bound

We got a late start Friday morning as we left Goshen and got to Minneapolis later than we had hoped that night.  But we met up with friends, Andrea and Deb and Sean and their boys.  They had an extra ticket to the U2 concert on Saturday, so “since we were in the area” I went!  And Ryan watched all the kids (5) in the hotel.  It went really well for him because Deb’s boys are older than ours and are really good kids.  And the U2 concert was awesome!  I’ll try to post the link to the Fan Cam and you can see me in the stands!  It rained for about 2/3 of the concert and poured for about half of that.  So, we were soaked by the end.  There was a tornado evacuation plan which was somewhat pointless considering how long it took us to get out of the stadium at the end!  But everyone stayed through the concert and the fans were great.  The band did an awesome job and we were so glad they took everything in stride and continued on as if it wasn’t raining/pouring.  Although Bono did sing “Singin’ in the Rain” a few times!

It seems like the end of our trip, from Minneapolis to Winnipeg, would be quite mundane.  Nope.  Well, most of the way it was and we were making pretty good time.  We let the kids play in the pool in the morning, so we got off to a late start again.  But when we got started, we were moving along fairly well.  Until Thief River Falls.  We decided to take a bit of a different route this time, as it gets boring always going through Fargo and Grand Forks.  So, we stopped in Thief River Falls to pick up some “picnic-like” foods for supper.  We were in Wal-mart, taking our time when there was an announcement over the speakers that a Tornado Warning had been issued.  I didn’t really hear all of it, so we weren’t sure what we were supposed to do.  I thought they were saying we couldn’t stay in the store.  So we went outside and the sirens were going.  I was pretty sure it wasn’t a good idea to be in the van, so we went back inside to a “safe zone” where people could wait it out.  We ended up being there for another 30 – 40 minutes until we got the all clear.  Then we headed out again and realized we would be following the storm.  So we detoured a little, costing some time, but just caught the end of the storm which just turned into a little rain.  Finally, we are on our way – just 2 ½ more hours.  Except that when we got to the border crossing, it was closed.  Yep, all closed.  So it took us about 1.5 hours to get to the border crossing at Emerson that we usually go through.  Hmmm, maybe this time we should have gone the boring way.  Our friends went that way and had no problems, except a wait at the border.  Luckily no other issues came up for us, but we didn’t make it home until a little after 1 a.m.  So tired.

Ironically, these were the strange clouds we saw the day before the tornado warning.  I just had to take a picture of them.

So, in summary, it was a great trip.  A few more warning sirens than I would have liked, but at least we were warned and not hurt!