It’s that time of year again where I bundle up in winter clothes and search for buried treasure. It’s the St. Paul Winter Carnival Medallion hunt. Go ahead, look it up. I’ll wait…

The third clue came out at midnight and it set our emails boxes on fire.  All of us had the same ideas.  We spent the day making plans and decided to do something crazy.  We went digging on day 3.  We did this last year too.  It’s a little silly to get out there with only a slight idea of where to look.  We spent two hours in Highland Park tonight.  We split up and Justin & Aaron walked and dug up their own circle and Katie & I split off the other direction and did our own investigating.  We also went down the slides at the playground and learned that when you are full grown adult, you go WAY faster down the slides.  I think I actually screamed out loud.  We looked in trees and fallen logs.

Right before we left, we found one huge tree and got down on hands & knees to check it out with the head lamps and found a dead squirrel tucked in.  Good thing we looked before sticking our hands in the hole.  I may be a little less aggressive now with my digging.  I’m pretty excited to get the clue tonight.  We are going to clear our minds and pretend like we haven’t already found a park we liked and see where the next clue leads us.

This was our game plan tonight 🙂

The whole idea of thousands of St. Paul families out and about every day and night for two weeks in the middle of winter is fantastic.  Everyone is exploring parks they may have never been to and meeting new people and getting great exercise.  I read all about previous winter carnival traditions today on the Pioneer Press website.  Here are some of my favorite photos:

Building the Ice Palace in 1886
Overthrowing King Boreas in the early 1900’s
Snowmobile Races in the 70’s
Lighting the Torches 2008