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WIP Wednesday: Travel Diary Edition

Last weekend, Tyler and I took a little road trip to Minneapolis for what was essentially a craft beer tour of the city. So! Much! Beer! I'm certainly not complaining, as it was all quite fantastic, but wow! I think we were both surprised by just how awesome the craft beer scene is in the Twin Cities.

If you follow me on instagram, you may have seen some of these photos, but I have tried to find some additional pictures which I haven't posted yet to mix things up. I suppose I should start with the beer since there wasn't quite as much knitting that took place on vacation as I would have liked (but as you will see, there was some here and there!).

Surly Beer was the overwhelming theme of the trip - it was everywhere, and it was delicious! We found a really good place called Nighthawks Diner near our AirBnB which ended up being brand new (as in, it had just opened the week we arrived!), and they had a lot of great beers on tap.


We even spent our last day at the brand-new multi-million-dollar Surly Tap Room, which was incredible. I don't think I have ever seen a tap room that huge before in my life, and as you can see, it was jumping on a Saturday afternoon!


It wasn't all Surly beer, however - if you follow me on Instagram or Untappd, you probably saw the full extent of the local craft brews we tried, which I won't be posting here for brevity's sake. We did take another cool beerscursion to Northbound Brewpub, where I had my first-ever beer flight which had a sample of every single beer they brewed! We each chose one to have as a pint with lunch, and then took home a mini-growler of our mutual favorite which had way too high of an ABV (nearly 10%) for day drinking.


When we weren't eating food or drinking beer (which, let's face it, was most of the trip), we were exploring the city. We went to several coffee shops, a couple of record stores, and I even found a craft store called Digs, which was near where we were staying.


There were lots more tourist spots I wanted to hit, but the few we made it to happened to be Minnehaha Falls:


Believe it or not, Tyler actually wanted to go to the Mall of America, so we went and gawked at the insanity of Nickelodeon World:


...as well as the Lego Store:


I spotted quite a bit of yarnbombing around town courtesy of someone who calls themselves Knitteapolis. I saw way more pieces than I took photos of, but they were fun to spot as we walked around!


My only regret was that I wish I had squeezed in more knitting time overall, but the 14 hour drive round trip did allow me to make some good progress on my Lake Michigan Tee:


Plus I nearly finished a fingering weight hat which I cast on at the start of the trip:


We made a few stops on the way to and from Minneapolis to pick up some bottles of New Glarus beer. It's available only in Wisconsin, and has a cultlike status here in Chicago. The Serendipity was particularly tough to track down - we've been looking for it for over a year, in fact. When we finally found some at a gas station in western Wisconsin, we nearly cried because it was 11:15 am on a Sunday morning, and they don't sell alcohol until noon. NOOO!


As you can see below, this story has a happy ending - after making 3 more stops later in the day, we finally snagged a few bottles of the elusive Serendipity. I'm pleased to say it was worth the effort, too.


That's pretty much it for vacation and knitting photos, thanks for bearing with me! Don't forget to check out my Etsy sale on Luxury Sock Yarn Mini Skein Grab Bags - they're going fast! Be sure to also enter for your chance to win a Cleckheaton Superfine Merino hat kit, which ends on Monday, May 18!

Thanks for joining me this week!

Comments

  1. Love this post! And I can't believe you've never had a beer flight before!

    Next time you come to KC, let's do some beer tasting - there's 2 breweries in North Kansas City (near Tyler's parents new digs actually) that would be fun to try out!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I need to go on a Serendipity quest on our next trip to Wisconsin ... this post just makes me want to drink!

    ReplyDelete

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