Four Baggers and Foreclosures

I bought a new 20 Sided Dice the other day. This is the first new one to enter my collection in probably 30 years. Which brought to mind writing another of these Random Top Loader posts, since I hadn't done one in a while. And since I haven't finished anything else I'm in the middle of writing, a Random Top Loader seems appropriate. But before I get to that... So where did this new black and yellow die come from? Citing numerous reasons, but not one specific reason, Laura and I decided on an extended weekend in Duluth, MN. The "San Francisco of the Midwest" is always a good choice for a quick and easy getaway. It's about a two hour drive from the northern suburban rings of the Twin Cities. Once you descend the hill towards Lake Superior, it feels like you're a lot further from home than you really are. And no trip to Duluth is complete, without the obligatory photo of the Aerial Lift Bridge. This one taken from the unique vantage point of approaching the b...

Whenever I go on a drive to anywhere outside of a 20 mile radius of where I'm living, if I don't come back with a series of interesting pictures of something abandoned, I consider that mission a failure. In August, 2018, on an overnight getaway to La Crosse Wisconsin, I took a bunch of great pictures of a significant abandoned building. Making that weekend an unquestionable success. That building was not Big Bear... I wanted to write a quick story on the "foreclosures" side of things this week, and found inspiration while looking through my photo archive external drive. But after I wrote my story about the former Big Bear gas station, it ended up being really boring. There simply wasn’t enough going on at Big Bear to make a decent story out of. So I decided that I would then add the rest of that weekend’s events around it, to make this a story worth writing. So I will tell my brief Big Bear story, mixed in between parts of the story of that weekend. ...