The Zoo

So living in Minneapolis, not really knowing many people, I tried to find things to do on the weekend besides sit in my room and play with my laptop. One weekend I went to visit the Minnesota Zoo .

10 goto Zoo

The Minnesota Zoo

I had an unofficial policy that if I was going somewhere on the weekends within the Twin Cities, that I would ride my bike there. This was because riding a bike is pretty good exercise and I was too cheap to pay for gas and parking. Given my self imposed limitation I figured I could just ride my bike to the zoo and back. Well, after actually looking into where the zoo was, it turned out that it is twenty miles there...one way. Now I ran pretty regularly so I was in decent shape, but I was no biker and twenty miles was pretty far for me. Having my "I can do it despite what common sense says" attitude, I decided to ride my bike there anyway. I must admit that I probably would have caved and rode a bus there, but there were not any going there in the morning. Anyway, the ride there actually was not that bad. It only took my like two hours, and I was fine when I arrived at the zoo.

20 Zoo:

The zoo itself was pretty good. It was not real huge (I have been spoiled by living near Chicago and going to Brookfield Zoo), but the exhibits they did have were cool. The animals were pretty active too, so I got to see more than just animals sleeping. I probably liked their exhibit on native Minnesota animals the best. Even though it did not feature real exotic animals, it gave a nice up close view in carefully constructed habitats.

Animal Pictures

	Not the plastic kind in the front yard
Rodents	Doogie!!

30 goto home

So after enjoying the zoo, I now had to get back home. First though, I had planned on stopping at Mall of America and REI on the way back. Of course, there was a river between the mall and me, with a limited number of crossings. In fact the only real river crossing that was not about ten miles out of my way was across Highway 77. Of course, I was on a bike so my road traveling was slightly limited. From my MapQuest map, I could not exactly tell if the road crossing the river was bikeable or not. Even if it was not, there could be a bike lane next to it. So I did the smart thing of going for all or nothing and headed towards Highway 77. Of course, when I got there I saw that the highway was an interstate where bikes were disallowed. I decided to push my luck even further though, heading towards the river on side roads, hoping that there would be a bike lane for me to cross on. Also, there was just barely a line next to the main bridge on the map I had, so I hoped that was a side road I could use.

That is not my bike on the other side of the sign

Guess what though—I got pretty close to the bridge and suddenly recognized where I was, the same place I had tried to cross during my trip to Fort Snelling. So here I was stuck at this bridge again, with going over it my only viable way to get to MOA. It looked like other people had gone over it before though, and someone did not like it, because they had quite high fences around the area, making it almost impossible to get through. Of course, I could always just follow the route back home that I followed several weeks earlier.

So I arrived at MOA and walked around there for a while. I was here once before when I was younger during a family vacation, but I did not really remember it much (only the Lego store and Camp Snoopy). I quickly found out though, that this was pretty much just like any other mall, except bigger. Stores selling mostly overpriced clothes that I did not want or crap that I did not need. There were a couple of cool specialty stores there, but mostly it was brand name stores. I was probably one of the few people that could go to Mall of America and not spend any money.

REI was a little bit better though. They had about just about anything you would need to partake in any kind of outdoor adventure. I looked around at their camping stuff for a while, getting quite a few informative brochures from there. My only complaint about the store was that they are really expensive. Their products probably were higher quality, but I prefer to go for second run Army Surplus type stuff which is much cheaper.

And that was pretty much my day. Got back, avoiding a rain storm that looked like it was going to soak me. By the end of the day, my legs were pretty sore and I think I relaxed in my bed the rest of the night.