Sunday August 22nd

It's taken me a while to get around and post this, but here I finally am.

After camping Friday night and Saturday night, we woke up Sunday and decided to just pack up camp and head to the town for breakfast (since we ran out of gas for our burner). We tried out the small town of Nerstrand (pop: 227)... only to find one small convenience store and nothing else.

We drove into the little town of Northfield (pop: 19,657). We wanted to find a little hole-in-the-wall place to eat breakfast, because well those are the best kind!! We found LOTS of coffee shops with pastries, but we were searching for Kyle some biscuits and gravy.

We also saw these signs about "Defeat of Jesse James Days"... which caught our attention because well we grew up in Missouri and Jesse James was born in Kearney, Missouri and we had watched the new movie with Brad Pitt as Jesse James and since Brad Pitt grew up in Springfield, Missouri as well there were just all sorts of connections going on. lol.... so we wanted to figure out what all this jazz was about.

We asked a gal in one of the coffee shops of a good place to get a hot sit-down breakfast and she directed us to this 'hole-in-the-wall' literally, we had to walk down many hallways to get there, place called The Tavern of Northfield.

While eating, I asked our waitress what is all the hustle and bustle about Jesse James up here... she said "Oh I need to get you a brochure" she brought us back a pamphlet talking about the Defeat of Jesse James Days (which is to take place next weekend... we should go. And we read the following story:

So after our breakfast we of course had to go check out where all this took place:

After the excitement of Jesse James died off, we got Harpo and walked over by the river in the great town of Northfield.

If only we had some bread we could have fed the ducks.

We had had enough of Northfield and headed back into the city. We decided to swing by the St. Paul Farmer's Market, where everything is 100% local... and on our detour to downtown St. Paul, I looked over and spotted this!!!!!!!!!!!

It was actually farther off the road than that, and really I have no clue how I spotted it... but I did! And I screamed! And Harpo and Kyle both thought something serious was happening... well it was serious I spotted a peanut!!!! So of course we pulled, I pulled over fast to get into the parking lot to drive over and get a picture.

The little eagle woodstock on top was so cute:

While I was taking pictures, Kyle was cleaning out the glove-box where we discovered a mouse nest. A mouse must have ventured into our Jeep while it was parked when we were camping and somehow either got car insulation or something and made itself a little nest. This isn't the first time to find signs of mice in the jeep. When we went on our backpacking trip we came back to the jeep to find little turds left for us on the seat. I'm fine with mice, as long as I don't find a snake in the car!

Happy Summer! :-)