Make that wind your bitch.

I last wrote from the small town of Hinckley, MN.  I thought it was a wonderful town, replete with a quik-e-mart, high school, and TWO thrift stores.  In fact, I found the best buy all trip: a neon orange visor.  It is the most god-awful piece of sun protection...i.e. something only my mother would wear.  It reminds me of this card I once saw in the campus bookstore.  On the cover is a girl's head shot prom photo.  Her hair resembles a massive helmet.  The word that comes to mind is dowdy.  On the inside of the card: Her hair was her chaperone.  The implication is that her hair basically wards off the entire male species; no fear of catching any guy stealing milk from THAT cow.  Anywho, my visor pretty much accomplishes  the same feat.  It's so heinous, I'm surprised anyone can bear to look at me while it's on.  I wear it religiously.

Also in Hinckley was the circus.  Yes, the circus came to town.  How fortuitous that we were there considering it was only in town for one night.  Tickets were $14, which we agreed was far too much.  But the best things in life are free as while we asked about tickets, the previous show let out, bringing with it a massive elephant.  Many photo opportunities were seized.  All of them with my orange visor.

While I loved the backcountry charm of Hinckley, Craig showed an extreme distaste.  "Get me out of here" became his mantra for the evening. 

From Hinckley we headed to Duluth.  Here too Craig had strong opinions, this time about the weather.  Apparently 63 degrees was too cold for the Chicagoan.  I however was in rapture over the cool, breezy city.

Also in Duluth was the first synagogue of the trip.  I was anxious for some normal hosts, ones without dogmatic harmonized prayer songs (St. Paul), come-hither Jesus drawings (Palermo), Jesus movie posters (Camden), or massive Christian rock lyrics displayed in the dining hall (Westfield).  Members of Temple Israel (Reform) were incredibly down-to-earth.  We came and they said, "Let's eat, hear about your mitzvah, and then let's eat some more."  My kind of people.  

As Hinckley had a circus, Duluth had Finnfest.  That's right, this weekend is the annual North American Finnfest, held in Duluth.  Well we just had to go.  My personal motivation was to see the president that looks like Conan O'Brien, who unfortunately was not scheduled to make an appearance before this morning.  

So Wednesday night, Christopher, Jessie, Maki, Ian and myself walked 2 miles into the heart of Duluth to find the festival.  After a very difficult time finding it, we were directed to go the convention center across the highway via skywalk.  As Duluth has weather similar to Yetti's cave in the winter, everything is connected via tunnels.  In the summer, they are primarily used to traverse across the highway.  However, someone must have missed the memo to turn the heat in the tunnels down.  The tunnel was so unbearably hot, Christopher nicknamed it the Tunnel of Fire.  

Sorry, we'll have to continue this later; I'll describe my current predicament tonight.