Minnesota

If you can't read the sign over the Mississippi it says welcome to Minnesota.  I was surprised to see how wide the Mississippi is this far North.  It really is an awesome sight.  I was hoping to find a place to go swimming in the river but we were kind of in a hurry to get to Rochester while the Mayo Clinic was still open.  The picture on the right is Jen eating lunch that Heidi had made for us that morning.  We still haven't had to cook on the road yet.

Jen is sitting in the Mayo clinic where she had her surgeries on her back as a young girl.  Jen's doctor has since retired but it was neat to see the place that has impacted Jen's life so greatly.  She even walked around the pediatric ward and said things have changed a little.  Now each of the kids has a computer in his or her room.  Man when I was in the hospital when I was little I was excited just to have sole control of the remote.  Pretty soon they have DV slots for movies.  Who knows they may already.  We also went and got a shake from the place where Jen's mom would get shakes for her when she was in the hospital.  The picture on the right is a train.  It's pretty close and really big.  Lest our mothers worry that we were racing trains in the VW it was actually stopped for a minute for some reason.

Since we were going through Minneapolis we figured we had to stop at the Mall of America especially since one of our ex-coworkers, Doug Brez, told us we had to.  I didn't ride the roller coaster but did watch it go by.   The place is huge.  We only covered probably about 1/5 of the mall in the 2 hours we were there.  We thought about playing mini gold but decided to do a little shopping instead.  On the way out we were going to get gas but it seemed kind of expensive so we decided to go a few more exits and find it a little cheaper.  That turned out to be a big mistake.  All of a sudden there were no gas stations for about 15 miles.  We ran out of gas in a construction zone.  Luckily it was down hill so we were able to coast down hill to the edge of the contstruction.  A State Trooper was right behind us on the bull horn telling us to get onto the shoulder of the highway.

The first picture is our State Trooper as he drove away.  Notice the traffice coming in the mirror.  I thought about trying to get a picture of him for the webpage but he wasn't in a friendly mood.  In fact, he said that usually they ticket people for running out of gas but he was in a hurry or something so after he ran our plates and my driver's license he let us go after he called AAA for us.  After we had been there about 25 minutes a family stopped by to ask us if we needed help.  I told them that AAA was on the way.  We started talking and it turns out that their daughter Kathy and son in law Mark are friends of ours from the mission organization.  It gets even more weird.  A month ago I called the mission to get Kathy's parents phone number to see if I could get ahold of Mark and Kathy and I talked to Jean.  So the only family I had talked to in years in Minnesota also happened to be the family that stopped  to help us out.  They actually had driven by once but decided to go back around and help the people that were broken down having no idea who we were.  God really does work in neat ways.  We appreciate all of you who are praying for us because we know that things like this only happen because of your prayers.  So now instead of sleeping in a Truck stop or campground we are in a nice air conditioned house and we got to know the Kenworthy's.  We serve the only great God.

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