Great Shares from Joanne Struz!

Hi Rose,

I hope that all is well with you and you are enjoying the summer. Mike and I have been enjoying the great weather and have taken a few nice trips. We got in a lot of golfing and made a lot of memories with dear friends. We spent a week in Maine and a week in the North Conway area with our golf buddies. We just returned from a trip to Minneapolis to see the Red Sox play at Target Field and to visit the Mall of America! Wow! It was something to see. There are over 500 stores and an amusement park that extends over 7 acres right in the mall. An interesting statistic is that if one were to browse in all of the stores for just 10 minutes each, it would total to around 86 hours! Can you imagine? We walked the entire Mall and all four floors!

The city is lovely and fun, as well. There are many beautiful gardens and homes in lovely well-kept neighborhoods exhibiting a strong sense of pride-of-ownership. There are many parks. The city is designed so that there is a park within six blocks of every home in Minneapolis! I found that to be amazing. Transportation is clean and efficient on the Metro. It has a light rail system that gets you everywhere for very little cost. We even took it from our hotel to the airport. We walked about 2 blocks to the Metro from our hotel through “Skyways”. We traveled about three quick stops, got on an escalator and we were in the airport terminal! Amazing and easy!

The Skyways are glass enclosed walkways rising about 4 stories above ground between the buildings and blocks. In the winter you can leave your coat and boots in your hotel and shop from store to store in the downtown unencumbered! You never need to go outdoors! It reminded me of The Annex. Do you remember that in Boston? I think it may have been in Filene’s and perhaps on the 5th floor. I’m not certain, so it could have been Jordan Marsh. But we could walk over the street to the next building in an enclosed connection. However, it certainly wasn’t attractive as are the skyways in Minneapolis.

Target Field is a beautiful ball park. We enjoyed a tour, two games and two wins by the Boston Red Sox! There were many Red Sox fans there! We found a couple of Irish Pubs which were fun after the games. They also were very nice. They are owned by an Irishman and the décor is authentic. Everything is imported from Ireland.

Well, Rose, I started this just to request Jeanine and Joe’s address, but it became like a “visit”! We will be in Florida again next winter and I hope that we can meet up again. I also hope that the weather is as beautiful as it was last year.

As always, thank you for the time and love that you give to The Lantern.

Love,

Joanne (Struz)