I'm heading down to Duluth today, and I'm pretty psyched.
For those of you (and I'll assume it's many of you) who have never been to Duluth, I don't know how to describe it to you. It's an absolutely GORGEOUS town, especially lakeside (it's located at the very tip of Lake Superior). I went to college there, and it still has a special place in my heart. Many of my friends still live there, as well as my little brother, and I doubt there's a place in the entire smallish city that doesn't hold a pleasant memory for me.
It's a good Minnesota Spring day. Temps already in the mid forties at 10 am, teasing and flirting their way to the 50s range. Perfect after a long winter where we didn't go above zero for probably a month and a half. The snow is already mostly gone up here on the Range, so I can't think there's even a little left anywhere farther south. Duluth is amazing, though wet, in the Spring, as much so as in the Fall. Those are it's two prime seasons - the winters are too cold and the summers are too hot, though of course "cooler by the lake"- the temperatures middle themselves in the transition seasons. I wonder if Duluth Spring will hold the same charm now that I'm no longer a resident...we'll see.
I put "cooler by the lake" in quotes like that because it's a fact of life in Duluth. Every night, the weatherpeople from every news station utter that same phrase. Lake Superior is the largest freshwater body in the world, making up 15% of the world's freshwater. A lake that size in the backyard has quite an effect on the weather, as you can imagine. Duluth is also a town of elevation changes; it consists of many hills. The college I went to, UMD, is situated approximately in the middle of the big hill. It could be absolutely gorgeous on campus, lightly snowing by the lake and raining on top of the hill, all within not more than 5 miles. It made planning an outdoor outing difficult, to say the least.
So, I'm going back to visit friends and see a Mason Jennings/Haley Bonar concert. Hopefully, the town will be as I remember it.