Today was heading home day. You think we just got breakfast and left? Nope. We had arrived so late we couldn’t go in the pool, which we did now. The pool was nice, had a way bigger hot tub then the other hotels, and included a wading pool.

After we left, we had to figure out what we’d get for lunch. Minneapolis came up fast, but we weren’t going to get through the nightmare traffic of that. We stopped at an A & W in a different city.

We all got root beers, except for Zoe, who protested she wanted chocolate milk. She got her milk, and a hot dog, and we all ate. One of our friends met up with us for a bit, since he was in Minneapolis, and chatted with us for a bit.

The drive was quick from here, only 3 hours. They went by quick, but Zoe wanted to play at Marathon Park (1 hour away from home) for 10 minutes. Yes, she got her wish. And we got home very soon after that.

Basically, when we arrived at home, we said hi to the cats, unpacked, and hung around. Given at one point today our fridge was totally empty, we used leftover PBJ stuff to make sandwiches for dinner.

We had dinner in front of the TV, watching the Simpsons, petting any passing cats. It had been a long 3 days of heading home, so now we could relax, stretch out, and enjoy being home.

Today, if you read yesterday’s blog, is the day the twist comes in. We woke up, had breakfast, and left for St. Cloud, MN. This was segment 2/3 (+ twist).

We wanted to drive on the Enchanted Highway, a road that has some stops with gigantic metal sculptures dotting the pathway. This was also my first Ingress mission

I started the mission once we arrived at stop #1: Giant Deer Replica. Here we took a family picture, we kids went through a cattle gate maze, and I made my first stop of many on the mission.

The next stop, a couple kilometers away, was giant grasshoppers and giant cattails. We took a pic, looked for a geocache (and failed), and I aborted my first Ingress mission.

Here’s how it happened: (Nice fact: The cattails had giant, sharp, metal prongs). 1 – A cattail had previously bent downwards, prongs almost parallel with the ground. 2 – Zoe was walking around, not looking where she was going. 3 – All of a sudden (B saw what happened, or at least claims he did), Zoe was on the ground, crying, with blood on her face.

I’ve never been to an ER before, and I think it’s for the best. Even though Zoe’s cut had been cleaned, it was deep (whereas my knee had been just the skin came off). Of course I sat and waited, Z went in for stitches, I sat and waited. Pretty boring, sitting there. At least my sister wasn’t the character in my book, alone in the wild.

Daddy suggested we go to McDonald’s, despite no Zoe. We just pretend we drove around for a bit. At McDonald’s, Mommy texted a picture of her holding “Tigee” and crying, waiting for stitches.

We drove back to the hospital, waited a bit, and Zoe and Mommy came out. The stitches looked ok, but now Zoe was the queen of the car ride. We got Twizzlers and Starbursts for her, and B and I each got some Twizzlers.

We did not go back to the Enchanted Highway, and just kept driving to St. Cloud. We got iPads earlier than usual here, probably because of Zoe. Eventually we arrived at St. Cloud and, noticing the time was almost 11 p.m., went straight to bed.