Have you ever been to Baton Rouge? Nice place, a little warm most months, for my taste, but in January it’s just about the right temperature. Diamond Lake is nowhere near Baton Rouge, unless you’re reading this on the space station. Anyway, if you head due North from Baton Rouge and make a hard left when you get to Cadott, Wisconsin, you can take Highway 29 West and it’ll dump you off onto 94 Westbound and that’ll bring you right into Minneapolis. From there, just ask somebody, if they don’t know, ask somebody else, you’ll find it eventually.
Well, now that you know how to get here, don’t go fallin’ in love with the State, especially Minneapolis & St. Paul, you’ll hate the taxes (ask a Republican), you’ll hate the winters (ask a Southerner), you’ll hate the passive-aggressive communication style (ask a Minnesotan)and you’ll hate that the Packers fans will talk shit regardless of how bad they may be in a given year because they have a lot of titles (a baker’s dozen to be exact) and the Vikings (which is really a much better name for a football team) have less than 13 – , 13 less, to be exact. Packer fans will also remind them they have the mecca of professional sports home fields, Lambeau. The Metrodome was really nice, like an oversized air-dome that you might find on a private school’s campus so the students can play hockey in the summer, but with beer. It replaced The Met (Metropolitan Stadium) – not the home of the Mets, but home of the Purple People Eaters, Twins, Kicks and eventually the biggest mall in the U.S., after it was demolished. Now they have U.S. Bank Stadium (talk about great names, said no one ever) and they like to think of it as a Viking Ship, a Viking Ship that has an uncanny ability to kill birds without firing a shot. But I digress. I’m here to tell you about this place, Diamond Lake Creative.
It’s not a huge facility, maybe big enough to fit a couple baby elephants, 4 or 5 Honey Badgers and 8-10 Bearcats, but that’s big enough for now.
Regionally, we’re at the far end of North, which is the extreme South of Northmore and is right smack dab in the middle of the chain of lakes commonly referred to as North of Normal. People sometimes assume they can get here simply by heading North by North but that’s only true if your starting point is along a line that runs approximately from 93.3° W +/- 0.3° – about Iowa, Louisiana up past Carpenter, Iowa. That said, if you head in a generally northerly direction, unless you’re in Canada, you’ll probably find your way sooner or later. And remember, if you get completely turned around and keep driving past the same wheat field in Kansas, contact a local realtor and start meeting the people you’re going to call neighbors – you were meant to be there.
