Road trip-day five

After our walk at The Mall today we loaded up our stuff and headed into downtown Minneapolis. We parked at the Hilton Minneapolis and walked the Skyway system over to the Convention Center to pick up my conference packet. Then I went to a session for people who had never been to the conference before while O hung out in the hotel lobby until check-in time. The Hilton is a nice hotel- very close to the convention center and connected to the Skyway system. It is in the heart of the most walkable part of downtown Minneapolis.


Here are some pictures of parts of the Skyway system. It is really convenient if you need to get around downtown. The Skyway hallways connect many different buildings on the second floor level. You can walk for miles from building to building without going out onto the streets. In the buildings that have Skyway connections, there are usually small shops, restaurants, and open plaza-like areas that look like you are outdoors (even though you aren’t) all the way along the hallways, except where the skyways go over the streets between buildings. These businesses, courtyards and plazas all open onto the hallways. Most of the restaurants in the connected buildings open onto the skyway on one side and onto the street on another side. One of the skyways that I used every day went along a parking structure. Instead of just opening into the structure, the hallway was still a carpeted 'concourse' with windows on one side and doors into the parking area.

This is a picture of the part of the Skyway system that we could see from our room on the 14th floor. I put lines on it to show the path that I used to go to the conference each day. The Convention Center is the red building at the top.