10/11/04’s illustrious band:

Soda Jerk

Brought to you by Winona, MN.

Usually my Saturdays are pretty busy with several hours’ worth of classes at the T’ai Chi studio and all the prepping, driving, and showering that go with them. But this past weekend I decided to play hooky and take a fall color tour instead. My Dad always used to drive us around the Black Hills at least once every fall to admire the changing trees, and at some point there would be ice cream. Seemed like a good tradition to uphold.

So that’s all I did that day -- drive. It was nice to forget about schedules and obligations, put a cheesy romance/mystery audiobook in the CD player, and simply meander wherever the road took me. I wandered through small towns where the gas station was closed for the weekend and through tourist towns where I was mistaken for a local and asked directions to the city park. (“Toward the river,” I said; seemed like a logical guess.) I ate lunch in a diner that was half self-service not by design, but because the teenaged waitstaff just kept . . . forgetting.

Just when I was starting to think about turning back, I found my ice cream. There’s a little shop in Winona that strives for an old-fashioned ambience. Called the Soda Jerk, it offers malts and sodas and dipped cones that have not yet ballooned to basketballish Mall of America proportions. There’s also a candy counter with glass jars filled with bright goodies and chocolate stars, and sticks of sassafrass and peppermint you can suck to a point sharp enough to jab your tongue on. I got a double dip of cookies & cream and black cherry chocolate, and a small bag of malted milk balls for the road. Unlike the ice cream scoops, the malted milk balls were massive, about the size of Ping-Pong balls. Which didn’t stop me from trying to fit two in my mouth at once, just to see if I could. I can.

And that was it. The audio mystery solved (the curator did it), I drove home to the familiar tones of Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion on the radio. Mentally, I’d had my feet up the whole day. On Sunday, I made chili. Fall is in full swing.

Today around the world: October 11 is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. Pass the stuffing, eh?

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