Merry Christmas, Everybody!

We are up here in Minneapolis, visiting with the family as we are having something of a holiday family reunion. The way the story goes, is that I had to perform a training session for work in Indianapolis the week that we were planning to drive north for vacation. So, this meant that I took a rental car to Indiana and when I was done, Luann & Katrina flew from Tampa to Indiana so we could start our holiday drive from there instead. Starting in Indianapolis, (we stopped at a Cracker Barrel for dinner and a cache first) then drove up to the Indiana/Illinois border to stay overnight at a 'Stop-N-Flop' hotel. Afterwards, we made our way into Chicago to visit the Osaka Garden Park (http://www.hydepark.org/parks/osaka2.htm) because it has a special attachment to Osaka Japan.

And, well... there were a couple of caches and some great photo opportunities nearby. After this, we headed north to West Allis, Wisconsin to stay overnight with relatives of Luann's (can you guess that we looked for and found a cache while we were there?). Next, was a brutal 300 mile drive to Minneapolis, Minnesota. There was a strong wind (gusting to 50MPH) and lots of driving, blowing snow to deal with. It was a treacherous drive, and we passed many, many accidents and 'off-road' excursions.

We are here now in Minneapolis and things have been much nicer. Driving around in the snow has been interesting with a rear wheel drive car, but not impossible. The only trouble we have had so far was when I got the car stuck in the snow, trying to pull into my brother's driveway after the snowplow trucks had gone by. It took a little bit of forward-reverse rocking and I quickly got the car loose. For the next try, I backed up to take a little faster run at the driveway and made it with no problem. Well, I guess I should tell you about the pictures...

We drove up from Indianapolis and stopped at a hotel for the night. When we awoke the next morning, we stopped off at the Osaka Garden to find 3 caches hidden in the area.

The Osaka Garden, even while in the throes of winter, was still quite beautiful...

We could barely understand Katrina, as she kept chittering away in Japanese.

We made short work of the other two geocaches, this one being a magnetic keyholder on a rail of the bridge.

And there was a small container located within the granite base of this statue.

And this is Katrina's first time in snow in West Allis, Wisconsin. She decided to faceplant nose down in the snow first (the marks to the right) then she flipped around and made a snow angel.

It's about 2:30 and the fog is closing in.

We even went geocaching while in West Allis. We were lucky enough to find a geocoin we had released in Tampa that had traveled all the way up here to Wisconsin.

Next, we had to drive through this nasty snow storm with driven snow blowing at about 25-40 mph and a temperature of about 7 degrees. It was a bit scary...

We stopped at a gas station somewhere along I-94. It was cold and the whole area was loaded with snow. We barely made it in and out of the plaza with our base-model, rear-wheel drive rental Magnum.

On the way up to Minneapolis, we came across over 2 dozen accidents, with cars down in the ditches, upside-down or smacked into something. It took all I had to keep our Florida car on the straight and narrow.

Yep, somebody wasn't up to the task...

When we finally made it, Katrina was in snow heaven again, as she frolicked with her cousins in the snow. These are the younger kids, working on their snowball skills.

In order to combat the teen-aged boys, it looks like Katrina and her cousin Kaylee decided to bring out the heavy artillery. I sure wouldn't want to get hit by one of those!

As the kids were playing around, my brother Jody was clearing the driveway and the walkways.

On the other side of the house, the teen-aged boys are lying in wait to pummel Katrina and Kaylee.

After a bit of shoveling, Jody decided to use something with a bit more power.

Some time afterwards, we worked on taking family portraits. On the left is my sister Treesie (spoken like; Tracey), next is Jody, then his wife Jennifer.

Here are all of the cousins, squeezed into one picture. From the top-left is Kaylee, then Katrina, then Warner (in Katrina's arms), Willem, Kyle, and Kevin. The little ones down in front, from left-to-right are: Michael, Linda and Ella. Hail, hail! The gang's all here!

And here is a picture of our hosts, Jody and Jennifer with Warner, Willem and Ella. As you can see, it's hard to get a nice picture of the family when you have young boys to deal with...

Here is a shot of Treesie's bunch, to include her husband, Bobby. I was hoping for complete sets for each family group, but my HP camera fell off a wall into the snow in Chicago and the lens drive motor died, so I was working with Luann's camera and I'm not too familiar with it. Needless to say, the shots of Luann, Katrina and myself didn't come out for use in the blog.

Well, it looks like it snowed again, because Jody is chucking more snow off of the driveway...

Instead of just watching this time, I got in some much needed exercise too.

I call this shot, "Sunday Morning Coffee", even though it was taken Wednesday morning. Hi Mom & Dad!

Time to get dinner going for the army! Every meal was a major affair when you have 17 mouths to feed. Somehow, Jody and Jenn got it done. Thanks guys, we all appreciated it.

And you know, we just had to find at least one cache while we were in Minneapolis. Thank goodness for this huge ammo box by our hotel...