The Twins have really good deals, since they don't get many people at each game. You can get really good seats for $11, and decent, although high seats, for $5. Plus, they have all sorts of deals, like Hot Dog Thursday, where you get a free hotdog and drink included in the cost of the $11 tickets. How about that? I love baseball.
Minnesota has some really pretty lakes ( of course, being the land of 10,000 lakes) and really neat parks. There are three lakes called the Chain of Lakes, which have all sorts of activities to do around them. They are neat places to go to just hang out. We have gone to Lake Harriet and Lake Calhoun, both of which are on the edge of downtown. They have picnic areas -without grills though :( as well as bike paths and of course the lakes with canoeing, boating, etc.
I ride my bike everywhere around here. The land is so flat :) plus there are some really nice trails, and there are lanes for bike riders on a lot of the big streets, which make me feel safe. We recently rode out bikes downtown to the library, riding across the Mississippi River in the process. We rode over St. Anthony Falls, a little waterfall dam type thing that was pretty looking.
Camping is a lot of fun in Minnesota. We went to the St. Croix state park, the largest state park in Minnesota. There were, however, a lot of mosquitos. We also went to Grand Marais, a little town of 3000 that was about an hour away from the Canadian border on Lake Superior. That town was really neat, a classic small little town. The lake was really pretty and very very cold (about 50 degrees). When standing by the lake, on an 80 degree day, it was so windy that we were cold in pants and sweatshirts. Jeff taught me how to skip stones and we did that for a long time, since the whole beach was made up of perfect skipping stones: very flat. We also saw High Falls, a 120 foot waterfall, in one of the state parks. We also went to CANADA!, our first visit there, eh. It was neat for the 30 minutes that we were there. They have some really weird signs on the road, such as Beware of the Moose: Dangerous at Night, with a really creepy moose on the sign.
I ran my first 8k (5 mile) race here. I did as I expected, although all around me people were running really fast. Oh well...
We have been to the Mall of America many times. It is a really big mall, although lacking in drug stores. I couldn't believe a mall that big didn't have a walgreens, or a CVS, or a Rite Aide or something. That was my one big pet peeve. The mall has 3 american eagles but no drug store. Anyway.... They have a large lego land, with a (almost) lifesize Harry Potter made of Legos. They also have Cereal World, an amusement park of sorts with all the General Mills cereal characters, like the Lucky Charms dude.
Heather, Jeff and I went to the Comedy Central Contest held at Knucklehead
Comedy Club. It was a lot of fun.
When we went to the AAAI conference in Edmonton, Alberta Canada, we went to the world's largest mall, with more than 800 stores. It had a pirate ship, 7 submarines, a waterpark, an amusement park, a casino, a dolphin show, and a lot more. When you get all of those things in it though, is it really still a mall? This was a neat place to go though, when it is really cold and rainy (45 degrees) in the end of July.