Meadow requested Black Sheep Pizza for dinner. Her favorite. We ordered for pickup and headed over there on our bikes. The location closest to us had been closed ever since coronavirus. We ate over nearby MCAD. We were stoked to be eating our favorite pizza again. We like to eat out but honestly I don't really miss going to a restaurant. I don't feel like I need to have someone serve me. We've been enjoying getting the food for takeout and having picnics instead. It's not bad at all. I do still miss bars and breweries. The kids chased butterflies. We decided to get a treat at the Michoacana store in uptown. The kids both choose bubblegum. We got fruity Mexican popsicles. Glad these are catching on in the states. We were obsessed with them in Mexico. Then we biked back around Bde Maka Ska and Lake Harriet. We hadn't had donuts from Bogarts in a long time, so, Saturday morning we took a walk over. They have a really great system. You choose your donut from the window ...

Another trip back to the cottage. This time we picked up tamales as we were leaving Minneapolis. We stopped in Turtle Lake to eat said tamales.  The park had a tiny playground that consisted of a slide and merry ground. There's a bigger and newer one nearby, but this would do. You have to say hello to the lake when you arrive. Hello, Lake.

Scott has been wanting to go canoe camping on the St. Croix for a few weeks.  More like a few years. Brooke decided on the windier Namekagon River branch of the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway. We thought about going last weekend, but I was thinking it might be busy because of the 4th.  We convinced Blake and Daniel to join us so we would have one car for drop off and one car for pickup. We met Blake at at the Riverside Landing, picked him up and met Daniel at our starting point at the County Road K Landing in Trego.  Since we started in the evening we only went 5 miles before picking our campsite for the night. We chose campsite 29.7. Campsites are free and first come first served.  It was a nicely wooded site but had lots of poison ivy. We would find out that would always be the case. Basically don't venture into the woods.

This years 4th of July felt a little different than normal. We skipped out on going to the cottage as there was too many people going.  Well, that's always the case, but more so with Covid-19. Someone always ends up sick when my family is all together. I had plans for us to go canoeing for the day and no one else wanted to so I was in a sour mood for most of the day. Plus it was the 10th day in a row of being over 90 degrees.  I'm not sure which of us suggested it, but we figured the beaches would be dead. Apparently most of the city left for the weekend because the usually packed Lake Harriet was eerily quiet.