Minneapolis Trip
Short day and ½ half trip.
(Some pictures coming soon)
Landed at around 12 into MSP.
Rental cars were really expensive, so we opted to use Ace Rental car MSP, found from Auto Slash.
It was pain to navigate to the rental car place from Terminal 1 but and took like a ½ hour of walking with escalators and trains but ultimately, we got there.
ACE is off site, you check in the airport and then they have shuttle waiting for you to drive you to the place, when we got to the place the car was waiting for us, we did a quick walk around and we were out.
Returning the car, you return off site but the shuttle takes you to Departures.
While I was skeptic about using ACE, I’m a skeptic no longer. Great, service, no issues with billing, in fact I rented for a day and ½ and they prorated the rate, getting me a cheaper rate they I thought. I would rent again from them in a heartbeat.
From there: We went on a 5-minute drive to the
Mall of America. Some cool things we saw were Crayola Experience, Amusement park, 5D theater, small Lego Land, cool sock store, none of these we partook in except the Crayola store which was interesting. There is one kosher vegetarian restaurant in the food court. Nice experience however the American Dream Mall is bigger and better, check it out.
Short stop at
Boom Island Park- I found it overgrown, not maintained, old wooden play areas.
When then headed downtown to the
Skyway. https://www.minneapolis.org/map-transportation/minneapolis-skyway-guide/ Really intricate system of bridges from each building to building. Its cool since you get to experience a lot of downtown buildings easily in other words each building has its style and every time you walk into another building you feel like your somewhere else. Only open during business hours and maybe during events. Check the hours before you go.
Next, we went to the Jewish part town. All the shuls, schools and kosher food are really close and everything is within 5 minutes of each other.
The fleshing restaurant,
Sato Sushi & American Fusion is really good, has a mix of American items like fancy burgers, bbq beef together with many kinds of sushi. We opted for the Mango BBQ beef and the herbed chicken ( Pictures coming soon), and as a dessert we got the fried ice cream. All were delicious!
We stayed by the
Holiday Inn Express & Suites Minneapolis (Golden Valley), 2930 Ingelwood Ave St. Louis Park 55416 22,000 points. Don’t stay here. Its expensive, a few items like bathroom door handle were broken, we ran out of tissues, walls are thin, and you can hear people in the other rooms.
While we had a good nights sleep, there are other places to stay nearby.
Next day after davening at Kenesseth Israel Congregation and checking out of the hotel, we went on a
tour of Target Field, Minnesota Twins, great ballpark tour. We had the tour guide to ourselves, highlights included the usual behind the scenes stuff, lockers rooms, press boxes etc… Two unusual items 1. We took the tour during a road game actively going on and there were some Twins support staff there were working in the stadium and we got the see them working. 2. There was guy on the Twins DL and he was on the field working out throwing the balls around etc…
Next we went the
Sculpture Garden, not sure why everyone makes a big deal about it, but it was waste of time.
Then we headed to
Father Hennepin Bluff Park, some nice short steep hills and trails (I think we meant to end up by Mill Ruins Park, but we end up by the other side) also the Stone Arch bridge which is closed for repairs.
Went to daven Mincha by the Minneapolis Kollel, then headed towards the four big lakes,
Lake Harriet, Lake Bde Maka Ska etc… the more north you go the quieter the lakes are. We wanted to kayak on the lakes, but the weather was windy and water was too choppy for that, so we drove around the them and ended up walking around Cedar Lake.
Then headed to the airport to return our car.
Closing thoughts: Minneapolis is an interesting city with a mix of many kinds of people. Everything is close together and while I like to explore there was no one important thing in Minneapolis I felt I needed to see. I went more the for convenience, that it was close to where I live, on direct short flight.
