2026 Winter Escape - The Journey Begins

 Monday, February 16, 2026

Unlike past years, this time I didn't have to worry about winter weather impeding our three-hour trip to the Minneapolis airport to begin our vacation. Nope. This year we are experiencing a "brown" winter with record setting high temperatures. When we pulled out of our driveway today the car dash showed it was 60º...unheard of for February in Minnesota!

But that doesn't mean we are beginning our adventure without concerns. Plans were made months ago for us to spend the night at our youngest son's home and he would drive us to the airport for our flight. We even booked our flight times to be the most convenient for his work schedule. Everything was set UNTIL we got a call from our son yesterday saying both of his kids were quite sick. A trip to the clinic had just confirmed what they already suspected...strep. He strongly suggest we stay with son #2 instead. 

A call to our middle son revealed that one of his kids was already on antibiotics for strep and the youngest had just woken up with a fever. Time to pivot. 

I quickly made a hotel reservation at a hotel near MSP airport. Son #2 insisted he was feeling fine and offered to drive us. (In retrospect, I'm not sure why we didn't just have our youngest drive us as we had originally planned. 😕)

The drive from our house to our son's was under blue skies and other than some dirty, lingering snow in the road ditches, it could have been a late fall day. We arrived just about the same time as our son finished work and he climbed into the driver's seat of our car. Just to be safe, all three of us donned face masks.

The lakes still were ice covered, but almost no snow!!

The drive took less than 45 minutes and I was happy that when we checked in to the hotel we were able to get on the list for the 7:00 am shuttle the next morning. That would get us to the airport about 2 hours before our 9:13 am flight...perfect. Our son grabbed a quick cup of coffee in the hotel lobby and then took off for home. He had just enough time to get to his son's hockey team practice (which he coaches) and then to his own adult hockey game afterwards. 

I had packed some sandwiches for a light supper which we ate while watching the Olympics and then we switched to the movie "Hidden Figures". This was a movie we had watched before, but being a former math teacher I still enjoy it. We could faintly hear the planes taking of and landing at the airport but are hopeful that the sounds won't interfere with our sleep.

Bob really enjoyed watching the curling competitions!

Tomorrow will be interesting. San Francisco is experiencing a series of major storms and the forecast for each of the next three days when we are there show "potential for heavy rainfall." Higher elevations in California are forecasted to get 8 to 10 FEET of snow!!) Yikes! 😮