Four seasons in Minneapolis- Spring

Through May and some of June 2010 we had spring, when all of Minnesota’s snow began melting. Like an emperor undoing his cloak, Minneapolis started shedding her cloak of snow! Soon the vast white spaces we were used to had become sparkling waters and it dawned on us as to why our car’s license plate said ‘10000 lakes’!! Point to note here is that small water bodies- the kind that we had in our apartment backyard- didn’t qualify as a lake, to do so they needed to be at least 2 square miles!

One of my very first memories of Spring is a trip to Minnehaha Falls with our dear friends Dalbir and Barinder. The 4 of us wanted to head outdoors and hence took a trip to the Minnehaha Falls, the falls looked really nice as it still had some remnants of ice near its mouth. We walked all the way down to the falls. Some music concerts had already begun at the small restaurant there and soon we learnt that all of summer we’d have concerts and other sand up gigs here and in various other parts of the city! Wow, this sounded like fun! From here we also headed on a short drive to the Missisipi river near Prescott. We stopped for lunch at a Mexican restaurant near there and then headed to another State Park round the corner only to realize it was still closed! This route was a rail route and our first glimpse of an American ‘goods train’ was also interesting...the train extended almost a mile!! Barinder was a seasoned ‘American’ since she had spent quite a bit of her life in the USA, so she filled us in with many stories of here experiences here that all of a sudden fel familiar to us! All in all a good trip and finally we’d started heading out!! :D

We made another trip with our dear friend Uday- to Red Hills. We climbed the barn bluffs for a trek there and some wildlife watching. We shocked a red fox out of it's siesta and after a good photo session the dazed fox ran off! Then we spent all afternoon bird watching before heading back home. This was more wildlife than we'd seen in a year now! :-)

Spring was gone even before we knew it and both AJ and I started thinking of having our parents over for summer. It had been more than a year since we’d seen them and so began a nice session of planning, booking tickets, getting them visa interview ready et al. Finally the three of them- AJ’s mom, dad and my dad were all set to fly in on 21^st Aug 2010. That gave us less than a month to plan their visit and we were determined to show them more than just Minnesota!

Gosh, the wait for summer, with this impending family reunion, just seemed endless!!