My Birthday Road Trip!

It was my birthday on Friday, and I’m telling you that I’ve had a really great birthday and you’ll never believe what we did!

Now there has been literally a life long debate on just when my Birthday is, but contrary to when my family thinks it is, it IS February 1st. My family had celebrated in on February 2nd for the longest time when I was young, and it wasn’t until I needed to find out something for school, did I find out that Feb 2nd  wasn’t my birthday! But I guess the thought was the 1st or the 2nd, they both were close. Ya, true fact. So when it comes to February 1st or 2nd, not only my family has gotten the day wrong for my birthday, but now some of my friends are messed up also. Crazy!

So my birthday was on Friday and I’ve always taken the day off work, and this year wasn’t anything different. For some reason when it’s your birthday and if you are doing laundry or other stuff, it just seems like you are getting the best of the day. My day was spent having a massage in the morning and doing some errands around town later in the afternoon. Then when Daryl came home from work, we started to get ready for our road trip. I fed the animals well during the day, but we knew that we might be gone overnight, so he fed them again really well before we left. Now it was time to get our bags packed and out the lane we went. I would tell you what the final destination was going to be – but you’ll have to see were it was later in the story. You just won’t believe it!

We started to drive and wouldn’t you know it that it started to snow. Now it wasn’t snowing really bad, but we decided to stop anyway because it was getting late. We stopped at a hotel in Mason City to not only to stay for the night, but also to grab a bite to eat and have a birthday drink. So about this time we’re sitting in the lounge/bar waiting for our food to come and we start to talk about the rest of the crowd in the bar. We saw some people with Buddy Holly jackets on that said they were from England, and we realized that they were probably there for the Buddy Holly reunion. It’s an annual reunion that happens in Clear Lake which is only a few miles from where we were staying. Buddy Holly’s airplane went down in the Mason City airport  where they were killed,  and at the Surf Ballroom they have a week long celebration in memory of the last show that he did. But when we were sitting there, we noticed this one guy that came in and he looked at us and smiled. Of course we smiled back and we made a comment to each other that he looked kind of familiar. But you know how that is, sometimes people look familiar and you just can’t place them. BUT you know who it was? It was Gary Busey. He played Buddy Holly in the movie, and has been in tons of other movies. So how cool it that? Having drinks with movie stars on my birthday. OK, Daryl got big points for this one.

After supper and drinks, we got our swimming suits on and spent some time in the hot tub. When we go into the hot tub we were greeted by 4 very small kids. They soon told us that they were between 5 and 7 years old and they were not shy. This one boy in the group that was 6 years old, told us that there were 6 people in the hot tub and someone had to leave because the rules said that only 5 were supposed to be in there. Then he just stared at us. Too funny! Then he told us that you couldn’t have drinks in the hot tub and we were breaking the rules. We didn’t see anything about the 5 people only in the hot tub, and nothing on the drinks either. So we were thinking at this time the kids wanted the hot tub to themselves. He left for awhile but then he came back again and looked at us and said ‘You know that no one is supposed to pee in the hot tub’. What? So I told him that he better not be peeing, and he just looked at me with this small kind of grin on his face. OK, that was it, out of the hot tub we went and soon I found myself  taking a bath in our room with a lot of soap to clean up. Now I’m not sure what this kid did do, but we didn’t want to take the chance!

The next morning we got up to check the weather to see if we were going to continue our road trip. Because the snow stopped during the night sometime, off to the car we went and we started to head north again. After a couple of hours and with a lot of anticipation, we were just on the outskirts of the town of Darwin, Minnesota. The population of Darwin is around 350, and my heart was pounding harder and harder as we were getting closer and closer to the main street. Now it wasn’t that big of a town, but I’ve been wanting to go here for some time now. What it so special about Darwin? Check it out:

YEA!! The Biggest Ball of Twine!

Yup, you guessed it. It’s the home of the Largest Ball of twine made by one man. It weighs 8.7 tons, is 11 feet high, and measures 40 feet in diameter and is enclosed in a glass case.We just died laughing when we were there because we were trying to take a picture of me jumping in the air in front of the display. But as you can see from the picture below .. it didn’t work so well. I guess I’ll have to add jumping to my ever growing New Years Resolutions.

No idea why I thought jumping with my mouth open would make me go higher? I look like I was just shot or something

I asked Daryl to take the pictures and he was such a good sport about it. He was standing on the road and would have to get off to the side when a car would drive by. But the people in the car looked like local people and just waved at us as they drove by. The funniest part of the whole afternoon was when I was checking out the museum that was closed and noticed a sign on the door. Now I didn’t walk up to the door, and to my defense I was pretty far away when I was reading it. But I could see a sign that I read as ‘Souvenirs are sold across the road in the blue house’ So we looked around and found a blue house and I asked Daryl if we couldn’t please just go check it out. He said no problem and off we went. Now I’m not trying to judge, but yikes this didn’t look like any place that you’d want to be selling t shirts and stuff. But after we got into the yard, I was heading to the front door. Daryl gave me a look, and said DO NOT go inside, it really doesn’t look that good. No one came to the door and back we went to see about other blue houses in this town. For some reason there were a lot of blue houses, but we couldn’t really find one that looked like they were selling Ball of Twine stuff. I told Daryl that it wasn’t such a big deal about not getting a shirt, and even though it wasn’t the same.. that I could just order one on line. As we were driving through Main Street there was a bar and if some one was selling souvenirs, it would be certain that the locals  in the bar would know. I grabbed some money just in case I could buy some thing there, and into the bar I went. When I asked the bartender if they knew where to buy the things, she said well it was right there in the bar. I said really? That I was looking for a blue house that it said on the sign. Then she said – not Blue House… Blue Moose. The name of the bar was The Blue Moose. At this point the guy that was sitting there having dinner just looked at me like, crazy people, and I just did a nervous laugh. I was hoping that he wasn’t watching me try to jump or I was really in trouble.  But I did get a t shirt and life was good again. I just hated to tell Daryl that it was the Blue Moose that was on the sign because we spent some time driving around kind of stalking all the blue houses in town.

Now to start making the trip back home. We did make one more stop at a sports shop to check out kayaks. Daryl is buying me one for my birthday and we wanted to see what they had. With it still considered being the winter month season, the picking was slim. But I did take a picture of the inside of the building because it  is pretty neat. A whole lot of camouflage, but pretty cool animals.

No kayaks, but a lot of animals

After a trip to the Casino to loose some money and to get some supper, we soon were pulling back into our driveway. When we got home, we found out that all our animals were doing well and Ms. Reno was very anxious to hang out inside the house with us for awhile.

Our Road Trip was a lot to do in about 24 hours, but it was a great birthday! Now I’ve got to start checking out where our next adventure will lead us.