Beforf Leaving Room

Come on, where is the quality control, people?

As previously posted, we stayed in a hotel in Bloomington for two nights during our trip for Gerrit's surgery. Cambria Suites is located two or three blocks northeast of the Mall of America. IKEA is straight west. Cambria Suites is a pretty nice hotel - sort of an upscale one. Good thing I had enough reward points for two nights! The rooms are a loose interpretation of suites with just a partial wall separating a bedroom area from the living room and bathroom. Samantha and I stayed in the room the afternoon of Gerrit's surgery.

Our wonderful window view looking to the southwest. The Mall of American can be seen in the distance on the left. IKEA is seen towards the right side.

Let us share some information about IKEA. The name is made up of the initials of the founder, Ingvar Kamprad and the first letters of the farm where was raised, Elmtaryd, and the village, Agunnaryd, in southern Sweden where he grew up. Ingvar Kamprad was just 17 when he registered the IKEA name. The company was obviously started in Sweden but now appears to operate out of the Netherlands. Yes! We did visit the store on Thursday evening and picked up frozen yogurt cones from the deli before leaving. It is a cool store.

The view to the northwest. Samantha, you got in the way! :)

This is one way Samantha and I entertained ourselves - by watching planes take off. The other way was her asking me every few minutes how to spell the names of our family members. She has taken to writing letters and names, which is very good, but I have to admit it eventually became a bit of an annoyance. Why couldn't she just sit down and watch TV? Ha.

Friday evening Nancy's brother, Loren, came over to visit and took along his son, Luke. Loren's wife, Kelly, was working. In the photo above Nancy is feeding him and Samantha is watching. She loved him.

Here she had her own chance to feed Luke. He seemed more interested in the television. I can't blame him - Dirty Jobs was on.

Samantha even showed Luke her book. Kind of an interesting shot because Nancy is looking at the book, Samantha is looking at me, and Luke is looking at Samantha. He is five months old and is a cool little guy. He eventually fell asleep and they left shortly after.