Nő Place: St. Paul's Most Notorious Tour

The first thing you need to know is: I have the MOST awesome friends in the world.

They are spread out on at least four continents, and most of them have not met one another, but the one thing they have in common is that they are all ridiculously awesome.

After all, how many people could you call at about 2:30 on a Saturday, with no previous plans and entice them out for a full day tour, water pistol fight and crime re-enactment super adventure?

Last weekend that is what I did. I called my friends D & N from school, proposed the idea and an hour later we were in the car.

A while back I had stumbled upon Erik Rivenes' St. Paul's Most Notorious driving tour. It comes with an audio CD, map, directions and a puzzle that you need to solve as you go. I had already tried it out with another friend, but hadn't bothered to do the puzzle - BIG mistake. The last track is left for you to solve with the puzzle, that is filled in with clues from the places that you drive to during the tour. I am absurdly curious, and no amount of Googling (well maybe more Googling than I did) turned up the answer.

My only recourse was to take the tour again (aw shucks...not more history...). This time we added the bonus of re-enactments, junk food and water pistols.

Some of our highlights:

The cop arresting a fugitive on the Street Car

The supposedly unarmed fugitive shoots the detective, who calls a beat cop over to help apprehend the fugitive

People jumped out of the windows of the Street Car

The beat cop clubs the fugitive.

Pig’s eye loosing the footrace for the land claim. Not only was St. Paul almost named Pig’s Eye, but the guy lost one of his land claims, when a judge decided to settle the two squatter’s claims with a footrace between the 60 something year old Pig’s eye and a guy 30 years his junior.