So i got a job offer in Minneapolis. I don't know anything about the area. I'm coming from philly. Looks like there aren't any real close tracks. I figured the best place to come is the beeb for info, haha. I need all the info I can get! Things to do, places to live, weather?
Husker Du, The Replacements, Soul Asylum and Prince all came out of the twin cities area. What more is there to ask about?
It's a good place - was there for school and still have lots of friends there. Cost of living compared to Philly will be much lower (provided you don't want to keep your house/apartment heated to 90 deg in the winter...). Great music scene, and plenty of good restaurants and bars.
BIR is the only track close to the cities. It is about a 2 hour drive north of Minneapolis and is home of the CRA. Typically 5 races per year, with 2 being the long course and 3 on the new short version.
Crazy D'ern and clear Putter live there; ask them. When we went house shopping up there the houses were more expensive than in Florida. Apparently all the walls have to be six feet thick and covered with narwhal tusk oil to withstand the arctic blast winds, and the foundations have to be three stories deep to get below the permafrost, and the roofs need to be able to hold six tons of snow accumulation. All that is expensive, they said. I dunno how that compares to Philly. Great town, though. We liked it a lot. Had the houses not been a kick in the nuts we'd have been very interested.
Actually, those statues were moved from Brainerd(actually Baxter, to be correct, i do believe) several years ago.
What part of the metro is your job? With St. Paul next to Mpls., and about three rings of suburbs around each city, the metro area is quite large. The Good: Summer is fantastic, CRA is an incredible racing org., BIR is one of the greatest tracks in America, there is an abundance of year round outdoor activities,(fishing/ice fishing, snowboarding/sking, etc.) more shoreline than California (lakes everywhere), Mpls. is a very nice city for it's size, lots of parks, museums, music, food, unemployment is low, state economy is better than a lot of states, good schools, the babes in Uptown The Bad: some say winter but I love playing in snow and staying indoors to recharge for a couple months, way too liberal politics that have been causing the city to decline, MN is known as THE welfare state so we get a lot of Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, etc. "finest" coming for the handouts, your car will rust, mosquitoes are the state bird, putter runs around in his whitey tighties, drivers here DO NOT know how to merge In Mpls., the North side is the slum and there are pockets of bad neighborhoods on the S. side. But for the most part, the S. side is the nicest. Overall, I think it's still one of the nicest big cities in America. I moved here in '93 and have not regretted one minute.
Oh, and here's our local sportbike forum. Someone just posted up about moving from Fl to here the other day. You will catch Putter, D'ern, and sometimes Chad posting here as well. http://www.mnsportbikeriders.com/forums/index.php?act=idx
It's funny that movie was filmed mostly near East Grand Forks, MN, and the Minneapolis Metro, but titled "Fargo", and yet no one I know has a clue what "true story" it was based on. The Blue Ox used to Exist in Brainerd, but looked nothing like the one in the movie. However, the dialog and the frozen corpses etc. is all accurate. ya know.
