Northward Bound

It seems like all of our blog posts lately start with some version of "it's been a while since we posted", and this one is no exception.  I suspect the presence of a 1 year old is the culprit for most of the delays, but more recently we've had another reason (there's a clue in the banner at the top of the blog!)  Long story short - we decided to put a plan in motion that we've had in the back of our minds for some time now - the Fabrizio family is packing up and moving north back to Katie's ancestral homeland of Minnesota!  More specifically, we'll be moving to the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St. Paul) in a couple of weeks.

We're excited about the move for lots of reasons, but most importantly it gives us a chance to raise Henry close to a lot of family and friends, particularly those who are closer to his age, which is something we can't offer him here in Birmingham.  Katie and I are also excited to be going to a city where we have a lot of family.  Since going off to college, we haven't had the experience of being close to a large amount of family, so we've missed out on lots of benefits.  We're looking forward to things like big holiday gatherings, our nieces' school plays, game nights, and getting to know family members who we haven't seen in years.  We also have a lot of old friends from high school and college years in the area, and we are excited to reconnect with them (and in many cases now their children) as well.  We're also looking forward to all of the things a large city can offer - shows, endless restaurants to try, activities for kids - and things specific to Minnesota and the Twin Cities... like sledding, the state fair, and cabin trips.  I know I'm excited to immerse myself in the MN experience and to be back in a pro sports town (hockey!), while Katie is pumped to be returning to a place that celebrates being crafty and eating pie!

Of course, leaving Birmingham will be bittersweet, too.  We started this blog not too long after we moved to here, and if you look back through the archives, you'll see that we'll be leaving behind lots of memories.  It will always be the place where we started our married life together, bought our first house, and started our family. It's been wonderful to have my mom living here the past three years and I will miss having her nearby a lot (couldn't convince her to move to MN.  We tried, but knew it was a long shot - she moved here because she thought VA was too cold!)  We have friends and colleagues here who we'll miss (always welcome to visit us in MN!) and we've both spent a lot of our careers here (in Katie's case, all of it), and there are memories with that as well.  And Birmingham has been a good town to us, and we'll miss a lot of things about it, like the mountainous terrain and lush southern landscapes, heading out to the farmer's market on Saturday mornings, the great eats we've found all over town, and weekend trips to the Gulf Coast.

We're going to try really hard to keep the blog updated as we go through this transition, so I am sure there will be plenty of updates about the move and how we're all settling in up there and exploring our new home.  It's going to be quite the logistical adventure just getting ourselves, our 1 year old, and all of our earthly possessions across the country, for example!  So, there will be plenty more to come on this blog.  But for now, I thought it would be interesting to post some facts and figures for the people reading this blog who aren't from MN and aren't familiar with this new place we're headed.  After all, we're hoping we have lots of visitors, and what better way to attract them than to post some of the things that we think are great about our new home?

Let's start with some numbers:  The Twin Cities are 864 miles as the crow flies and 1,066 miles as the car drives from Birmingham, mostly north and a little west, as well.  It's 11 degrees further north in latitude (though, trivia factoid - Minneapolis is still closer to the equator than it is to the north pole!)  The Twin Cities are home to about 3.3 million people, roughly 3x more than Birmingham and making it the country's 16th largest city.  There are 11,842 lakes in Minnesota (despite the official slogan "Land of 10,000 Lakes" - Minnesotans are a modest folk).  Some Twin Cities superlatives: Minneapolis was recently awarded the title "most bike friendly city in the country" and has the world's largest pedestrian skyway system connecting buildings downtown at over 8 miles long, while the Mall of America is the country's largest mall (I'm personally not so interested in the shopping, but having that much indoor real estate - plus an amusement park built-in - is going to be great for entertaining Henry in the winter).  The Twin Cities is also considered to have a very active population and at least one organization rated it the healthiest city in America this year.  The average age is 36, and there are large German and Scandanavian (Norwegian and Swedish) populations in the cities.

A little geography lesson... Minneapolis and St. Paul make up the Twin cities.  St. Paul is on the eastern side of the Mississippi River and Minneapolis is (mostly) on the Western side, but they're not directly across from each other.  St. Paul is about 9 miles downriver from Minneapolis, and because the river flows west to east in the area, this means St. Paul is about 9 miles to the east of Minneapolis.  St. Paul is the more "charming/quaint/European" style city, while Minneapolis is a bit more modern and urban.  The cities are in the  east central part of the state, a short drive from Wisconsin.


Some weather tidbits... everyone knows that Minneapolis has very cold winters.  This is of course true: the average high in January is 24, and the record low is -41.  The average annual snowfall is 45 inches and there are about 100 days a year with at least an inch of snow cover on the ground.  As a result, things like skiing (cross-country and downhill), ice skating, hockey, sledding, snowshoeing, snowmobiling, ice fishing, and snowy retreats to a north woods cabin are popular winter activities there.

Less well known is that because of its location in the middle of the country it has large seasonal swings, and therefore has warm months, too.  The average high is 84 in July, and there are five full months with an average high of at least 70.  The record high is 108, and consider this - Birmingham's record high is 107, and the entire state of Florida's record high is 109.  So, it definitely can get warm in Minnesota, and once it warms up, MN is full of walkers, bikers, runners, rollerbladers, people on scooters, boaters, fishermen, and tons of people generally enjoying the outdoors.


The Twin Cities are a huge commercial and industrial hub.  A sampling of companies you may have heard of that are headquartered in the Twin Cities include Target, Best Buy, 3M, General Mills, Land O Lakes, Aveda, Toro, Dairy Queen, Medtronic, Andersen Windows, Polaris, Cargill and UnitedHealth Group.

For other techies out there, it is interesting to learn about the history of computing in the Twin Cities.  It is the birthplace of the supercomputer (Seymour Cray and Control Data Corporation.  Cray [the company] is still headquartered there.)  Even earlier, the world's first commercial computer (the Univac) also had roots in the Twin Cities.  Many of IBM's innovations over the past 40 years were produced at their R&D facility in nearby Rochester, MN.  And, for those of us who were online before the web (yes, there was an internet before the web!), you'll remember the Gopher protocol, which was invented at the University of Minnesota.

So there you have it, a few interesting facts to give you a taste of the Twin Cities.  We think our new home a pretty interesting place to be!  We're looking forward to blogging more about MN and our adventures once we get there, and hope some of them will include visits from some of you!  In the meantime, it's back to packing for us... ugh.  Take care everyone!

PS - When we get a chance, I'll do a "retro" post summarizing the highlights of the summer, we did some fun things and have some more photos to post, as well.