fall weekend vibes

Hopping weekend over here! Good food and drinks, adventures and aspirational outings...one for the record books in many ways. 

Started the weekend strong on Friday with a fantastic happy hour with Hannah and Abby at Pazzaluna in St. Paul...get the Sophia Loren, a pear-and-amaretto martini that, like its namesake, is a true classic. 

I spent Saturday morning on a frigid solo walk around Lake Harriet...my intended companion, Anna, was unable to make it as she and her husband Kevin welcomed their sweet baby boy to the world that morning instead! I think that beats a lake walk any day, personally. :)

Jodester, Jonathan and I rendezvoused mid-afternoon to start the 2016 Midwest Homes Luxury Condo/Apartment Tour (what a mouthful!). Offering nine different sites this year, we checked out the Portland Tower condos and Edition Residences on Saturday afternoon. Both were finished beautifully and boasted fantastic views of the new Vikings stadium...although with price tags well out of my price range, it felt a bit masochistic to fall in love with views and finishes. 

Fortunately, we had Spoon and Stable in our future to dull the pain! 

It's my favorite place in the Twin Cities, I swear. We grabbed our usual corner booth in the bar and quickly ordered three of their new fall cocktails...a highball for Jonathan, a Jack Rose for mama, and a Sidecar for me.

Perfect homage to fall flavors. (Pro tip: while S&S's dining room books out three months in advance, dedicated fans can always get a seat in the bar if you show up by around 5pm. The place is genuinely FULL by about 5:30, though!)

The cocktails, as always, lived up to our high expectations. Jonathan also followed up with the daily, a riff on a Manhattan that gave the St. Paul Grill's a run for its money. 

(We may have ordered most of the bar menu: crispy potatoes, french fries with Bearnaise powder, creamed spinach and cheese curds, Brussels sprouts with apple butter and hazelnut crumbles, pork belly tacos, duck meatloaf sliders, and a butternut squash soup that nearly brought tears to my eyes. SO GOOD.)

All followed up with a decadent apple brown butter cake with apple-and-buttermilk custard and candied apple slices. Diane Yang, the house pastry chef, can do no wrong in my eyes. 

From Spoon and Stable, we hopped in a particularly hilarious Uber to head to the Target Center! The event? The "Kellogg's Tour Of Champions Gymnastics Exhibition." The crowd? Me, my mom and Jonathan, and thousands of little girls who do gymnastics and their parents. It was completely adorable - so many of them had cute signs or were wearing their gymnastics gear. I totally remember little Lizzie circa 1996 being similarly obsessed with the 96 team...and, despite the fact that I could barely do a handspring, thinking Olympic gold was in my future. 

The event itself was totally not what I was expecting...I was hoping for the actual Olympic routines, and instead it was a campy, choreographed and very overproduced romp through sound-and-lights "flashy" gymnastics. Our nosebleed seats didn't help much, either...still, in spite of all of that, the sheer athleticism and spectacle of what these people can do with their bodies blew me away. All in all, a fun, if random, night out! 

Sunday found us finishing up the Luxury Condo Tour, with stops in Minnetonka and Uptown. While the Walkway stole my heart with its amazing rooftop pool deck and suspended-over-the-sidewalk glass hot tub...

...the true winner for the day was The Lakes, a truly luxe, brand-new apartment complex adjacent to the Calhoun Beach Club. The kicker? The very most basic model started at $2800 a month, with penthouse units going for eight times that. That said, with finishings like those above, it's totally worth it. 

Not to mention the view from the roof of Lake Calhoun...which, on a day like yesterday, was stunning enough to make me want to sign away my life for continual access. As much as  I may moan about them, I truly do love both of my Twin Cities so much! 

Happy Monday, campers! Here's to cinnamon coffee and leaving work early for board meetings, hooray! 

101 in 1001 #100: Go to the St. Paul Winter Carnival.

It seems incongruous to be posting this 101 in 1001 as the temperature outside nears sixty this week, but I can't help it. It has been, for the most part, a gorgeously mild winter in the Twin Cities and that made it so much easier and more comfortable to check this one off the list! 

The Winter Carnival is the stuff of Minnesota legend. Call us crazy, but something about subzero temps makes everyone want to get outside and throw a party. This year, I wrangled a few good friends and took full advantage of our temperate weather to join in!

Although not officially part of the Winter Carnival, this year's Ice Castle out in Eden Prairie soared to the top of my list as soon as I saw gorgeous photos of the icicle walls collecting in my Instagram feed. Kels and I hit it up at the end of January and it definitely didn't disappoint! 

I was so blown away by the crazy, dripping towers of icicles that made up the walls. Eventually we figured out that the entire thing was built around hoses that trickled water down the walls, eventually freezing into the craziness that became the "castle."

Below, a Kelsie for scale. 

Also, the snow was like shin-deep in a lot of places and where it wasn't, it was packed down into ice. Knowing my trademark grace and ability to stay on my feet in any given situation, I was apprehensive. (Please note: I made it through fall-free. WIN.)

Selfie game on point. 

Once we navigated through the mazelike entrance, the whole thing opened up into a series of courtyard-ish rooms with fountains, smaller tunnels for kids, and even slides. It was really cool to walk around and just explore it, and to people-watch. 

Being the twenty-seven-going-on-seven-year-old that I am when it comes to anything "Frozen," I immediately freaked the everloving eff out when we came upon an Olaf in the maze of the inner castle. 

I freaked out even more when I realized that there was a REAL OLAF doing appearances...

AND EVEN MORE when I saw that Elsa and Anna were also there. Fortunately, I retained enough of my (almost non-existent) dignity and refrained from joining the absurdly long line of children waiting to hug the princesses. I'm pretty sure Kelsie was grateful for that fact. 

After about twenty minutes of exploring the castle, it started to rain (because rain in early February in Minnesota is totally not a sign of global warming or anything, duh) and so we went and had a margarita. It was okay...because my margarita was frozen, so we were on-theme. Right? Right. 

Sufficiently tequila'd up, we headed to actual St. Paul to take in the actual carnival...and thank goodness we parked at my office for free, because St. Paul was a madhouse. 

We took a photo with yet another ice castle (that was a bit more conventionally castle-like than the Eden Prairie one!)...

...I noted that my employer sponsored the carnival, woo-hoo!...

...we wandered around, admired a few booths, looked for and failed to find the Summit Ice Bar, discovered that the ice sculpting didn't start til late that night, took one more selfie, and left. I'd say more points to us, because St. Paul was crazytown and there was honestly not a ton going on at that point. 

I also took advantage of unseasonably warm temps to spend an evening after work rambling through Rice Park admiring the finished ice sculptures! None of my iPhone photos turned out (shocker/story of my life), so I'm sharing these beauties by Kelly K Photography of my favorites. 

Although it's not technically part of the Winter Carnival, Red Bull Crashed Ice has become such an iconic part of winter in St. Paul that I had to finally make it over when Laura came to visit! For those unfamiliar, you'll understand it best if you go here, but in a nutshell, it's basically a luge course with obstacles on hockey skates at around 40 mph. And it's COMPLETELY insane. We scored with temps in the 50s for the Saturday night finals, and the scene was an utter madhouse, with over 150,000 people packed on Cathedral Hill. 

We moved around a lot and checked out several different vantage points...there's legitimately nowhere where you can see the whole course, so we wanted to see as many different spots as we could! Watching the racers launch essentially out the Cathedral door under that gorgeous stained glass window was such a cool juxtaposition. 

We also got right up against the glass just after the first bend. Seeing how fast these guys went blew my mind. I couldn't imagine trying to navigate downhill and stay on my feet on ice skates...then again, staying on my feet when it's icy isn't exactly my strong suit even on flat ground. The video below shows one heat of the quarterfinals...ignore my dumb "whoop" every time a skater passes us, I was so into it I almost knocked the teenage boy next to me over. Oops. 

We worked our way down to the bottom of the course right in time for a complete clusterfuck of a run where a guy actually hiked up the "Mount Everest" hill thing after a crazy disqualification and massive pileup wipeout. We also caught Minnesota local Cameron Naasz's quarterfinal run. He ended up winning the whole thing in absolutely spectacular fashion...watch the final here and die over his absurd athleticism and total cool-guy flair. 

I had the best time watching with Laura! Such a fun, "only in Minnesota" way to spend an evening. 

And now I can officially (at least in my mind) put winter to bed...here's to sixty-degree temps and pushing the North Faces to the back of the closet for now! 

For more 101 in 1001, go here, duh!