An Orlando Tour of Prior Lake, Minnesota

An Orlando Tour of Prior Lake, Minnesota

Todd Swank's Diary Entry for November 13, 2016

On Thursday night I stopped by to see Meatsauce, Mike Morris, and Greg Coleman talk Minnesota Vikings at Mystic Lake Casino.  Our Vikings have been having a tough few weeks, but I'm hoping they figure things out and get the season turned around soon.

Friday morning brought us to see the new movie, Arrival, with Amy Adams.  It was an interesting take on aliens being smart enough to figure out how to travel to earth, but not being smart enough to have a plan for how to communicate with us.  So Amy Adams comes to the rescue with her translation skills and a message about why being nice to the aliens is better than being mean to them.

  

It's been an unseasonably warm November in Minnesota, so Miss Sheri and I took the dogs down to the lake to go swimming.

We don't do this nearly as much as we used to because our young pup, Blue, has not been very kind to our 11 year old retriever, Sunny, when they play this game.  For the longest time, Blue thought the game was for us to throw the ball in the water, Sunny would then retrieve it, and Blue would attack Sunny in every way possible as he tried to get out of the water.  Poor Sunny.

But they're actually getting better at playing this game together.  We have to time things right so each of them gets a ball thrown to them so they can get it instead of the other dog.  Then convincing them to bring the balls back to us rather than leaving them out in the water is another challenge we have.  But all in all, they're doing pretty good.

My buddy, Orlando Mazzolini, stopped by for a Saturday afternoon roadtrip.  Before we left, he asked to see the progress on the porch that Miss Sheri has been re-building.  She's come quite a long ways so far, although she still has some things that need to be completed.

  

Orlando has lived in Prior Lake longer than I have, so I asked him to take me to some places I've never been to before.  We started out at Cedar Lake Park which isn't all that far from my house, but for some reason I've never been there before.  Orlando tried to tell me he'd actually never been here before either, but I'm not sure if I believe him.

It's actually a beautiful park and lake out in the middle of some cornfields.  We talked about that being one of the nice things about living in Minnesota among it's 10,000 lakes.  There's so many dang parks like this that are around us, you can always find a new one to explore.

I thought it was pretty funny to see this sign before going on the dock to check out these two kids fishing.  They didn't seem to be too worried about breaking the rules, though, because I walked back and forth on the dock and they just kept right on going.

We had to leave after Orlando started getting klutzy and fell backwards down some stairs.

Orlando then took me to a couple of local bars I hadn't been to before.  They were both also in the middle of cornfields in the middle of nowhere.  This was St. Patrick's Tavern and they had really good burgers.  I had the St. Patrick burger which included Canadian bacon on it.  It was pretty darned good.

We then stopped by a little bar called Daugherty's which looking at it from the outside was pretty unassuming, so I figured there wouldn't be anyone inside.  It was actually quite hopping.

Coincidentally enough, one of our co-workers from Oracle, April, happened to be there which was a pleasant surprise.  I guess you just never know who you're going to meet when you go on an Orlando Tour of Prior Lake!