Wife and I ROCK the North Shore

The best advice I have if you are planning a trip to the north shore is to bring my wife. It will increase your enjoyment of nature's beauty to the point where you will start to question existence in a my-wifeless universe.

First some pics I couldn't fit elsewhere in this blog: 

Yup, north shore baby.

  

 On the north shore, people fuckin skip rocks. It really is this idyllic. I know!

 The Angry Trout Cafe deserves every bit of praise it ever gets. Oh My God they are good. DO NOT SKIMP HERE. Order what your heart wants and skip a meal later, you will not regret it.

We got there just past color peak season, but it still frakin rocked.

 

For one, wife is a whiz at packing. After all the time she spent living out of a suitcase shuttling between her shit life in Grand Forks and her weekends with me in Fargo, she became very good at it. As Malcolm Gladwell would point out, she put in her 10,000 hours of packing.

Problem is this last week she was off her game. She had an interview scheduled for Thursday night, which after working until 6 p.m. didn't leave any time for packing once we got home. However, she got it done and we got out on Friday by 8 a.m. Wife don't pity no fools when it comes to packing.

For two, you are likely to hear the best combinations of the English language ever spoken when you are traveling with my wife. Here are a few excerpts:

"I just want to see a goddamn tugboat and a goddamn lighthouse in this goddamn town, then I want some pie."

"I need some coffee before I kill an orphan."

Deer in the North Shore just stand there and pose for pictures

Dogs in the North Shore drive, but they are crap at parallel parking

For three, if you've played your cards right, if you've been a good boy for four to five years, doing dishes, laundry, driving, shopping, cooking, you get rewarded. We drove up to the Lutsen ski resort, where the gondolas were still moving up to a distant mountain (Minnesota Mountain). The scene was breathtaking. 

Then wife, who has a deadly fear of heights, says

"I'll do it. I'll go up with you. I owe you for so much, so this makes us even."

And it does. Her fear of heights is like anyone's worst fear. I doubt I would be able to hold live snakes for wife, or scuba dive in an eel tank with waterproof spiders. This was her equivalent. So we took the eight minute gondola ride up, and up, then up some more. Then we got to this chalet thing, Lake Superior off in the distance, trees with most leaves down, but still smatterings of mustard yellow and fire orange smeared on the hillsides. The floor of the balcony at this chalet was a wire mesh that wife didn't realize was 30 feet from solid ground until after we were nearly done and I asked for the camera to do a foot picture.

That’s what wife does for me.

She also knows how to splurge. We're still paying for the weekend festivities, but oh how we ate like kings. Poutine slathered in rainbow juice, Herring that sprang from Lake Superior onto our plates with a final look as if to say, "It is my time, please enjoy me." Smoked trout that stank up my hands for hours after. And the Pie. It was this fruit crumble thing from Betty's Pies outside of Two Harbors, and each bite was like tasting little balls of sunshine that burst forth and still brings tears to my eyes thinking about it five days later.

Last slice of heaven

Then on Sunday, we made our way from Lutsen Resort, Stopped at the Split Rock Light House for a spell, ate awesome burritos at Burrito Union in Duluth, a city I think must be the Portlandia of the Midwest because oh my god the hippies/hipsters/lefties.

We got back on Sunday.

And oh, I forgot to say, the Thursday before we left, my boss emails me and asks if my wife is still looking for a new job. Out of the blue because my boss and everyone I work with is awesomesauce personified and I can't believe it. It's a temp job that may last two weeks to two months, and it gets wife out of the miserable mess that HTC has become and into something that begins to approximate a wage that she is worth. It's not what she plans to do with her life, but it gets her out of the hellhole and into a head space that is healthy and human.

Wife was still not sure about leaving her job, since it's a steady thing and she loves to help students despite all the bullshit that they throw at her every week. Then she got an email from her new, and third, boss in a year that questioned her integrity on her time sheet. So wife let off a stern email, I went to the school the next day to get all her shit, and she emailed the HR people to tell them she was done. Simple, clean. And they haven't talked to her since.

Next blog, her exit interview. It's a thing of beauty.