One of our favorite summer evening dinner trips is biking 4.5 miles along the Mississippi River to
Minnehaha Falls State Park. Often we eat at
Sea Salt, an awesome, casual seafood restaurant next to the falls. Wanting to save some money, yet catch what might be the last warm summer weekend evening at the park, we packed a picnic with Henry and Theo in the
Roo. The beauty of biking to a picnic with the Roo is that you can roll the kids and gear right to where you want to be, unroll your blanket and food, and pull out the baseball mitts and balls to feed Theo's insatiable desire to hit the ball. You can also roll within earshot of the live music at Sea Salt and within "sipshot" of their fine Surly beer :).
Batting the ball to live music at Sea Salt. Baseball has been a major highlight for Theo this summer. He is quite a good hitter and took pointers from the Twins game we saw in July.
Ice cream is also a big attraction at Sea Salt. While Theo has worked on his batting, Henry has developed quite a swipe, especially for Sebastian Joe's chocolate-peanut butter ice cream.
Oh how fast the late summer days end. Where just weeks ago we could ride home in the light, night falls as we leave the Park and head home to another summer-late bedtime. Thanks Sea Salt and Minnehaha Falls for all the great visits this summer. Until next year...
One of our favorite summer evening dinner trips is biking 4.5 miles along the Mississippi River to Minnehaha Falls State Park. Often we eat at Sea Salt, an awesome, casual seafood restaurant next to the falls. Wanting to save some money, yet catch what might be the last warm summer weekend evening at the park, we packed a picnic with Henry and Theo in the Roo. The beauty of biking to a picnic with the Roo is that you can roll the kids and gear right to where you want to be, unroll your blanket and food, and pull out the baseball mitts and balls to feed Theo's insatiable desire to hit the ball. You can also roll within earshot of the live music at Sea Salt and within "sipshot" of their fine Surly beer :).
Batting the ball to live music at Sea Salt. Baseball has been a major highlight for Theo this summer. He is quite a good hitter and took pointers from the Twins game we saw in July.
Ice cream is also a big attraction at Sea Salt. While Theo has worked on his batting, Henry has developed quite a swipe, especially for Sebastian Joe's chocolate-peanut butter ice cream.
Oh how fast the late summer days end. Where just weeks ago we could ride home in the light, night falls as we leave the Park and head home to another summer-late bedtime. Thanks Sea Salt and Minnehaha Falls for all the great visits this summer. Until next year...
From reading your posts, including those involving rental cars, and from observing habits of my car owning neighbors and friends in NYC and other cities, it seems that a decent of urban families do not necessarily need and/or even want their own car for everyday commuting and errands but could easily could benefit by sharing the ownership of a child friendly car or two. Have you guys considering trying to set up a car co-op/commune in MN?
ReplyDeleteJulia: First, thanks for being such a dedicated reader. You have identified a great need. When we were first considering going "car-free" we pursued car-sharing with friends who didn't use their car a lot and wanted to share expenses. The biggest hurdle is insurance. To equitably share the liability as two families living in separate households we would have had to get a commercial policy. These tend to be quite expensive, which especially hurts when your intent is to not drive much. A co-op could spread the costs across more people, however the rates may increase in proportion to the number people? I don't what the economies of scale would be. We would have to look into this. We haven't investigated this idea in ~6 years. We do have friends who were trying to create an informal co-op to share a minivan. I haven't heard the latest structure, but one idea was to shift the title between member families every 6 - 12 months. Still not a great system, but a start if you have some very committed people. In general, we need insurance policies that make this more practical. Note there is work to base insurance rates on the mileage driven - a great idea that could make this idea more viable. Let us know if you hear anything.
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