The border is not where I left it: the 9-hours-each-way road trip to Minnesota we intended to take this weekend turned out to be closer to 13 thanks to the unexplained rebuilding of Wisconsin. I can only guess that all the construction was due to some kind of great flood, as every car we saw for the last three of those hours had some sort of boat attached to it. Luckily, my wife and I enjoy one another’s company and the journey was as fun as the destination. More luckily, the return trip was shorter, although that further suggests that Minneapolis is truly a city on the move.

I see no point in a prolonged travelogue for such a short trip, but I will say that we had a fabulous time seeing old friends finally make something of themselves and graduate. In addition to sharing in this achievement and enjoying some Minnesota hospitality, my wife also got to see the fabled Mall of America, so named because it is a mall and is the size of the United States of America. I had been to the Mall of America once before, a decade ago; the week of Valentine’s Day, my anniversary with my then-girlfriend, and my then-girlfriend’s debut in a play, I was in Minnesota at a student leadership conference. That relationship did not last for some reason. On the plus side, I did learn a lot about student leadership, which came in handy for the remaining three months that I was a student. I am unintelligent.

As it was a decade ago, my favorite store at the MOA remains the Mall of America store, which is a store in the Mall of America that sells objects that say “Mall of America” on them, so that you can buy something to commemorate the time you bought something at the Mall of America. How I wish I could work there, if only for a day. My only disappointment was that none of their t-shirts had pictures of the Mall of America store on them. I suppose they don’t want to run the risk of making the universe fall in on itself.

Evolution and natural selection are not brightening up the deer of Wisconsin. On the way home, I saw twenty-one deer that had been killed by running out onto the highway; nineteen were in Wisconsin, and at least one probably died while lost. On the way there, my wife saw at least nine live deer standing near the highway; how many of these became the ones in repose on our return trip was an issue I chose not to raise. Unbelievably, we also saw a bald eagle that seemed to have dropped dead in midair and landed directly on the striped highway line. Had I been quicker with the camera, Pearl Jam would already have their next album cover in the bag.