Grand Ole Creamery & Pizza, St. Paul, MN

Though I'd been in to this ice cream shop before, I don't think I've done a post. 

This is a great old-school ice cream shop, including water in the back and old-timey stuff on the walls. 

Even after inhaling a Juicy Lucy and fries, I couldn't say no to Marshmallow Man and Chocolate Fudge Brownie. Wow, delicious. Go, go now. 

Shamrocks/The Nook, St. Paul, MN

This post could also run with either of these two subtitles:

- OH MY GOD THIS IS SO FRIGGIN' GOOD!!!

or

- FINALLY. WHY DID THIS TAKE SO LONG?!?!

After an epic fail to have my first juicy Lucy burger at St. Paul's Blue Door Pub (100% their fault), just last night I was able to have a no-chance-of-fail attempt at Shamrocks Pub, which is owned by and serves the menu from The Nook. 

I can confidently say that this burger, their Juicy Nookie, was well worth the wait, even after five years. The only regret is not having gone here sooner. That's my own fault. 

I had an expert Lucy eater with me and he steered me in the right direction for ordering, side choice (get the sweet potato fries - like crack!), and even eating technique. 

In spite of the advice, the Juicy Lucy got all over the bun, plate and my hands. But, I did avoid scalding my mouth with liquid hot magma cheese. 

It tastes even better than it looks. If I'd ordered two at once, I would have gladly eaten both in one sitting. 

It truly is friggin' awesome. If you never had one, go now. If you've already had one, go get another...it's been a long winter. 

Note: Shamrocks was a cool, broken in Irish pub. A definite contender for any St. Pat's Day shenanigans you might be getting into. 

Bike (Re)Build, Salsa El Mariachi Ti

What's missing?

Just Takin my Svenska Quiz

Red Wing Brewery, Red Wing, MN

A small adventure day requires a place to take a load off, decompress, and have a good beer (root or otherwise). We found this 15 month old resurrected brewery name down near the water of the mighty Mississippi. 

This new brew place has a max capacity capacity of 49 people, so it should never feel too packed, but the compact, light industrial space is filled with all manner of Red Wing brewing history. This artwork and history makes the space. 

The beer and pizza menus finish off the place. Be prepared to wait a bit for your pizza, perhaps filling the wait time with more beer? You can also get to-go growlers of anything on tap, including their very good rootbeer. We had that "beer" plus their fully leaded porter and stout. All of them were delicious, esp after an ambitious and somewhat white-knuckle drive on twisty snowy WI side roads...you got me this time Google Maps.

Two suggestions for upping their game or watch out for if you go - 

1. Watch the ingredient mix on the calzones. Ours had way too much ricotta and not enough of the ingredients we'd chosen. The crust and side of marinara were great though.

2. Service norms - while the crew is very friendly and helpful, they are missing some speed in the kitchen and what now seems like a ubiquitous POS system. They hand write checks then tally totals and taxes on a calculator. iPads aren't that pricey and a plug-in credit card reader can be bought at Target for $10 (like one from Square). 

Guest Pic, Hager City, WI

Found this gem of a small town bridge going from Hager City, WI to Red Wing, MN. Kinda sketchy roads this trip, but we could clearly see it could be a cool day-trip in the summer. 

 

Blog All Time Stats

For a long time I've used a free service called Stat Counter to count all manner of stat-related things on this blog. It really is informative, and somewhat scary, to see how much data is collected on all the people that visit. I can get right down to country, city, and ISP information.

I'm also now more familiar with the Google and its stat counter. I thought it would be interesting to see how the two compare. This is for the life of the ole blog...

From StatCounter:

 

 From Google:

 

In total, only a difference of 4,000 views. Those could be my own views alone... maybe. With this post, I'll be at 698 in total, over the 6 years I've been writing. Maybe that's not that many in the grand scheme of things, meh. What I also found interesting above is which posts had the most views all time. Clearly people are still finding the ones about the University of Texas, Japan, a horribly good MPLS dive-bar called the Red Dragon, and a great transportation museum in Omaha, the Durham. They were written so long ago, maybe posts get more popular as they age, gaining views and search results placement.

 

I'll stop rambling now - thanks for all the page views.