That's right folks, after literally years and years of "hey, we should..." and "this summer we're definately gonna...", some of my friends and I finally made it up to the Cities to hang out and party this past weekend. We had been planning the trip for a while, based on the fact that the Twins (my team) would be hosting the Cubs (George's team) for a weekend series, and it seemed like a good excuse to finally pull the trigger on the oft-mentioned-in-drunken-ambition plan to truck on up for a few days. So here, in photo form, is an account of our weekend of debauchary in Minneapolis...


After a late start and a few substantial delays along the way (thanks, MNDOT), we finally rolled into our hotel in Bloomington a little after 11pm Friday. It ended up being a pretty nice hotel room, on the 15th floor with a balcony and one heck of a vertigo, um, I mean view.

So, of course, seeing as we got in to town too late to really get ready and head out to do anything or drink anywhere, we all decided to sit around and read the Bible.

By which, naturally, I mean drank heavily. Come on, we're from Central Wisconsin...do you really think we don't come prepared? We're like Boy Scouts, just with more booze and slightly less underaged homoerotisicm.

And yet, we still managed to wake up at a decent hour, briefly admire the view from the hotel in the daylight, and head out to the Mall of America. Some of you may know of my slight grumpiness regarding the MOA, but it had been a long time since I'd been there, and some of us had never been there at all...besides, shopping is shopping, and if you're going to somewhere it might as well be the mall, right? Right. It serves its purpose.

No pictures from the, oh, 4 or 5 hours we spent in the megamall (too busy being a consumer), but from there we caught the LightRail downtown to the Metrodome for the real reason for our visit...the Twins game. The mascot, T.C. Bear was posing for pictures as we were walking around before the game, and Vanessa decided to get her picture taken with the lovable (and hard hitting) furry guy.

Sidenote: Why do so many of the pictures I'm posting out of the 150+ I took have Vanessa in them? I'm secretly stalking her, that's why. Oops, not that much of a secret now, is it? Damn.

And here's a view of the field from our (cheap) seats for the game. It was cool, a little far away from the action, but a nice view for the price. Now if only the drunken fools behind us hadn't been so unskilled at holding their beers without spilling a good portion of each onto our backs. Oh well, right? Lots of Cubby fans made for a pretty full dome, and a 3-0 victory for the Twinkies made the aformentioned drunken neighbors' chants of "Harry Carey is DEAD!" all the more enjoyable.

And here's a shot of George, Aaron, and Vanessa at the game. Eric is to my right, at this particular moment likely getting doused with a substantial portion of a $6 glass of Miller Light from the seats above.

After the game we walked (a ways, sure, but hey...it wasn't raining to begin with!) down to the U of MN campus to hit up one of my old haunts, Sally's, for some drinks before heading downtown. This is all of us (except me, of course), at one of the lower-key downtown bars. That's my other friend Vanessa, who met us out for a while, on the left.

A word of caution for the next pic...the group split up for a while downtown, with some of us heading down to O'Donnovan's for some good Irish beer, and others heading to the Gay 90s, where the place was definately hopping as always, but even more so due to it being Twin Cities Pride weekend. So afterwards, we all met up at Sexworld, which for the uninitiated is, yes, exactly what it sounds like. If you're of the curious sort, and not too easily offended, here's a likely NSFW pic of a member of our party enjoying the decor :-)


So, after some creative logistics and some afterbar shennanigans, we all made it back to the hotel in one piece, albeit as the sun was rising around 5am or so. The plan for Sunday was to wake up as early as possible and get checked out and back downtown to try to catch the Pride parade down Hennepin Ave, which we were (to my moderate surprise) actually able to do. It was pretty interesting, and defiantely as interesting a crowd as the parade itself, which is saying something. To illustrate, here's a pic of members of a leather club, in...ahem...full regalia.

So, that's it! Sorry about the small size of the pics when you click on them, blogger was having a bit of a fit trying to host them all last night, so I went the photobucket route today. Anyways, it was a full and eventful weekend, and I had a blast. I think we squeezed about as much into the weekend as we could, and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves for the most part. And while it was very, very nice to get home and fall face-first into bed Sunday night, I'm really, really glad that we were finally able to get up there and have a nice little road trip before I move away from Point again. Thanks guys!