Riverboat Trip

My dad came for a brief visit on his way home from Phoenix to Zuerich, Switzerland – he made it just before we are pulling down our tents here in Minneapolis. He is lucky, he gets the cleaned house (from the house sale) and none of the soon to be boxes and chaos!

What a great day for a relaxed trip down the Mississippi on a river boat. I’ve lived now 6 years in the Twin Cities and not once had we done this. I took tons of pictures and felt like a tourist.

My father has his own, very personal memories in regards to the Mississippi – here very brief but in his own words (many funny details missing – just a shameless copy/pasted out of an email he sent to me some time after his visit):

When we were on the boat in Minneapolis I forgot to mention that this was a great moment for me, having to do with my childhood. You know that when I was 11, my friend named Rolf and I we left home in Brugg on a sunny Sunday afternoon on our way to the Mississippi.

Rolf had read Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn” and we decided to do the same thing they had done, namely go down the Mississippi on a float. We knew we had to pass the border (in our imagination a high wooden wall we had to climb over) in Basel, then follow the Rhein to Rotterdam where we would sneek on a ocean liner, hide under a canvas and come out after the ship has left, offer to work as coal shufflers and then sneek ashore in New York. From there on we would ride on train axles to Minneapolis and then float down the river like Tom and Huck.

We didn’t forsee any serious problem. But just in case I took along my tomahawk. We managed to walk 20 miles of our planned journey when, at 2 in the morning and no place to sleep, we decided to return to our comfortable beds at home. We were taken back by a car and handed over to Mister Schaffner, the town policeman in Brugg who was on patrol on his bike. My first thought was “gee, this poor man, I wonder why he has to work so late”. So, our ride on the Mississippi was not only a wonderful excursion but for me also the realisation of that boy’s dream.