So here we are in sunny Minneapolis/St. Paul.
I’m writing up some notes as we go, and will post the whole thing on our return to Seattle. Right now — Wednesday morning — we’re sitting in the Lost Fox coffee shop in Lowertown, St. Paul. This would very likely be our neighborhood coffee shop if we wound up living in St. Paul for the first year. There are power strips at each table and it’s roomy, plus the lattes are good.
We got into town last night. Consensus is that losing a hundred pounds makes economy class a lot better. Easy drive into town, easy check-in, the hotel gave us a room with a ginormous front room and decent bedroom, after which we found some OK Mediterranean food on Nicolette, fell asleep early and slept poorly. Not the hotel’s fault.
Unsurprisingly all the people stressing online about crime and homelessness in downtown Minneapolis are overstating it a bit. Not saying it’s heavenly but it’s cleaner than Seattle and Seattle doesn’t wig me out.
We woke up early today (still Wednesday) and trucked over to the Minneapolis Farmer’s Market just to see what was what. Answer: it was closed. Mystery! So we drove over to Cathedral Hill in St. Paul to get breakfast at the High Hat. Decent food, and a lovely neighborhood — we have that on our list of potential final settling places in a year or so. Very green.
Returning to this on Thursday. The rest of Wednesday was pretty packed with apartment visits. We saw four places in downtown St. Paul, which I will not chronicle in detail. Suffice it to say none of them were perfect and none of them were unlivable. One really excellent view of the Mississippi River. The Lowertown district of St. Paul seems cool; there’s a nice park and a farmer’s market and a minor league baseball stadium.
The St. Paul skyways are intensely liminal. Every apartment building we’re visiting is connected to them. One of them is on top of an old dead mall which is being converted into more apartments and that’s a pretty creepy vibe.
After looking at a lot of fairly beige apartments, we headed up to Source Comics and Games just north of the Twin Cities for some geek tourism. I was really impressed; you forget how lower Midwestern rents can really let a game store stretch out. Big big RPG section with a lot of indie RPGs and even a spinner rack dedicated to zines. I was tempted by the hardcovers of Mythic Bastionland and Electric Bastionland but resisted.
Slept like a log. We’re now hanging out in a downtown coffee shop waiting for our first appointment of the day, after a decent but not great breakfast.
Time jump to Thursday night! Four more apartment buildings under our belt, all of them in Minneapolis. This time we wound up with two clear favorites, one of which edged out the other strong possibility thanks to better community amenities, a better floorplan, and a better washer/dryer. Oh, and a great move-in story with a loading dock and freight elevator. There are advantages to being a converted commercial building. More on this when we nail down our final decision (we do still have one more to visit tomorrow AM) and get accepted.
We also spent a couple of hours getting onto the light rail and riding all the way out through the airport to the Mall of America. The Mall is everything I expected it to be. Huge and there’s an amusement park inside it and yeah. The Barnes & Noble there is pretty good, with a dedicated Radiance Blu-ray display. Not that I’ll be looking at B&N for those when the Vinegar Syndrome store opens up this year in Dinkytown.
Good day. Totally exhausted — we’ve walked like ten miles in the last two days — but very fruitful. Oh, the Minneapolis Hyatt Place housekeeping staff managed to knock our toothbrushes onto the bathroom floor, didn’t bother to pick them up, and the front desk was all “oh, sorry, I guess you can come get a new one at the desk.” Dude, I don’t need you to get me a brand new toothbrush but you could at least walk fifty feet from the desk to our room under the circumstances.
Another time jump; as I write this it’s Saturday morning. Despite the exhaustion continuing, we had a lovely day Friday. We went down to Minnehaha Falls to sightsee a bit and had a nice breakfast at Longfellow Grill. The Mississippi River is so cool. Minneapolis went to some effort a century ago to make sure the waterfront remained city owned and it means that there aren’t rows of big expensive houses getting in the way of vistas and walks; it’s just that big old river that cuts the continent in two.
After that we headed back for one more underwhelming apartment tour, finished that up, and went back south to visit Uncle Hugo’s. They’ve maintained that 80s-90s SF bookstore feel — tons of used mass market paperbacks, a little bit musty, all the C. J. Cherryh you could ever wants. It’s a bit of a pilgrimage for me and it was nice to finally see another one of the legendary SF&F bookstores. The Trylon is right down the street from them so we did a drive-by, then hit the American Swedish Institute for lunch and admired their gift store’s stock of Moomin merchandise. We’re looking forward to a full visit when we’re settled in.
At this point we were theoretically done with apartment visits but… nah. Nothing seemed quite like what we wanted. So we went back to our then top choice to double-check on feel. Great amenities, nice people, windows don’t open and we worried about claustrophobia. Further interrogation of our feelings revealed that maybe living right downtown isn’t what we wanted? So we made a last minute audible when S. found a nice looking building back in that Cathedral Hill neighborhood. At this point it’s like 4 PM. She talked the kind lady in the office into giving us a quick tour, so we sped on over there.
And it was great. Not, of course, connected to the skyway. We didn’t find the skyway as useful as we’d hoped, since it’s really oriented towards work hours during weekdays, so we were willing to give up on that one. It does have EV parking, which puts it ahead of every other possibility we’d liked, there’s a co-op right across the street, and the neighborhood is extremely walkable with good public transit connections and easy freeway access.
Still no final decision but I suspect the last minute audible will turn out to be the right choice. Yay!
And now we’re just sitting around waiting for checkout and the drive to the airport and all that stuff. We went back over to St. Paul for breakfast to nose around the area some more. It’s still quite nice; reminds me of Ballard or Northern Queen Anne.
Back in Seattle, finally. Not much to say about the trip home: the flight was easy and public transit from the airport home is reasonably convenient. I do still really like the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport; it’s not overly busy and it’s a nice hub. S. sat next to someone on the flight home who was doing the same Delta flight home I used to do when I was coming home from Dublin – MSP is the correct airport to transfer in if you fly Delta from Dublin to Seattle. Very very successful trip. Cross your fingers that we get the place we liked.