Weekend Recap: Eau Claire, WI

Happy Monday! Did you have a good weekend? I decided to battle the snowstorm and drive to Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I left at noon when it was just lightly snowing. The roads weren't too bad. The thing that sucked was that I was driving straight into the snow and the Semi's were blowing the snow around making it a little hard to see. The drive up to Madison was the windy/blowing mess and I figured if it continued to be bad I could just veer off 90 and go to my parents instead of driving up to Eau Claire, but since the snow started to die down I figured I would continue my way up north. Somewhere between Madison and the Dells we came to a dead stop. I guess a couple vehicles spun out and a semi or two had to jack-knife to stop so 90 was closed for an hour or two. We all just sat there in our cars waiting, and by this time it was sunny and no longer snowing so it seemed so odd to me that there were accidents when it wasn't even snowing and there was barely any snow on the ground.

It was during that hour or two I really started to contemplate if my decision to drive up was a smart one or not. They cleared the vehicles and the road and I continued on my trek up north. It started to get dark and my windshield wiper fluid no longer wanted to work so I ended up pulling over three times to throw snow on my windshield so I could see where I was going. Seven hours later I finally made it to Julia's in Eau Claire at around 7:30 p.m. We had a glass of wine and caught up.

Saturday morning we woke up early to head to Minneapolis. Our first stop was to check out wedding bands for Julia's gorgeous green sapphire wedding ring. She found three options that will compliment the ring.  Then we drove to the Walker and walked through the Graphic Design: In Production show.

These are some of my pictures from the show:

 This was a really cool music video where they asked people to add photos to contribute to the video.

Towards the back of the show they had a vinyl cutter where you could create your own poster. Julia made her poster say "Design Inspires Change" and for mine I wrote "Make Today Your Day". I was hoping to have it framed last night so I could take a photo of it for today's blog but the poster board I bought isn't big enough so I will have to take a photo tonight or tomorrow.

There was also paper sitting on top of markers to make a print. So the longer you let it sit on those markers the bigger the dots were on the paper.

Very cool right?

(Pam I wonder if this is something you could do with your students?)

We ended our Walker excursion with the sculpture garden and I had to get this image:

Then we drove over to Ikea and spent about an hour in there! We left Ikea and went back to Julia and Tyler's to grab pizza, movies and wine! Sunday we grabbed a late breakfast and had Bloody Marys and Mimosas. I finally can say I enjoy a Bloody Mary! I left about noon to make my four/five hour drive back to Illinois.

I had a wonderful weekend with Julia and Tyler. I wish Eau Claire,WI and Arlington Heights,IL were closer together. How was your weekend?