Red Wing

A combination of a lot of fun and flat-out exhaustion have kept me from blogging since I arrived in Red Wing but I guess that means that the week is going well!

For one, I found out why Red Wing is called Red Wing -- it was named after a Sioux chief named Hupahuduta which translates to "Wing of the Wild Swan Dyed Red" because that's what he wore as a symbol of his position. Swans are cool and all but I haven't seen any of them while I've been here; I have, however, seen some friggin' bald eagles but more on that in a moment.

Jas and I have been having a very good first week. Too good, probably. We keep saying we're going to get ourselves fired because we're having too much fun. We had 91 kids at auditions on Monday which meant that we had to cut kids but things went fantastically for it being our first time as a team. On Tuesday, we ended up accidentally wearing matching outfits, so that was a very funny thing to happen on our second day.

Our second day also happened to be the day we saw the world's largest boot. Red Wing, MN is home to the Red Wing Shoe Company which celebrated their centennial anniversary in 2005 by making the world's largest boot which is a 638 1/2 size boot, meant to fit a 12-story-tall man. We checked and it does not appear that any old ladies are living in the boot.

On Wednesday, we did a few workshops and visited the Hobgoblin Music Store, which was neat.

Now, yesterday was a big day for us! We drove to Colvill Park which is where we'd been told that we might be able to see some bald eagles at this time of year. We were skeptical and vowed to take a picture of a quarter in a tree if we couldn't find any live eagles. But, um, we found live eagles. We found a lot of actual live, wild eagles and sort of lost our minds. I can't even begin to describe what we were thinking. This was just a cool -- if not slightly cooler than -- seeing a moose in Canada.

Today I bought my tickets for my spring break trip to North Carolina to see Whitney! In just under two months, I'll be flying from Milwaukee to Charlotte for a whole week.

And that's it from me from Minnesota for now! We've got two shows tomorrow and then onto Wisconsin on Sunday!