Saturday Single No. 273

Time for a road trip!

The Texas Gal and I have company this weekend: jb – proprietor of The Hits Just Keep On Comin’ – and his Mrs. are hanging out in St. Cloud in what jb and I have determined is Midwest Blog Summit & Beer Spree VI. As jb promised in a post on Facebook earlier this week, “There will be beer, tunes, and conversation aplenty. There has also been talk of bacon.”

Bacon? Well, yes, and I’ll get to that later.

Among our pursuits today will be a slow tour this afternoon through the St. Cloud Craft Beer Expo at our local convention center. Not being a beer drinker, the Texas Gal will sit that one out. But that just means she’ll likely be a little sharper than the rest of us when we settle down at the dining room table after dinner for an evening of gaming of some sort.

(The actual games have not yet been selected from the fairly full shelves the Texas Gal and I keep. I am fairly certain, however, that we will not play the version of “Risk” based on The Lord of the Rings. The Texas Gal and I tried it some years ago, shortly after she gave it to me as a Christmas gift, and we learned that the rules were more complicated than a hobbit’s lineage and it took most of the Third Age to complete the game.)

But the beer expo and the game night are only Pts. 2 and 3 of today’s three-sided single. Part 1 is a road trip, from St. Cloud up Mayhew Lake Road to the little burg of Pierz, where we’ll rummage through a couple of antique shops and then wander over to Thielen Meats, home to some of the best sausages and bacon I’ve ever found. And I’m not alone in that opinion; the bacon has even been featured in the New York Times.

After we stock up on bacon and sausages, our plan is to head west to Little Falls, where we’ll likely check out a couple more antique stores and find lunch of some sort, and then it’s back to St. Cloud with the beer expo on the horizon.

Summit/Spree VI began Friday afternoon with the sampling of several brews here in the Echoes In The Wind tasting room and continued with a fine dinner at Anton’s in the neighboring burg of Waite Park. (We had hoped to dine at the White Horse Tavern in downtown St. Cloud, but it was busier than we expected and we headed west of town.) The Spree will conclude Sunday morning with breakfast before our Wisconsin visitors head toward home. With, no doubt, bacon in the cooler.

And here’s an appropriate tune from Taj Mahal: “Bacon Fat” from his 1969 album, Giant Step, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.

Tags: Taj Mahal