I Did the ‘Minnesota Goodbye’ Last Weekend

I was able to travel back to my hometown in central Wisconsin over the weekend and spend some time with my mom, dad brother and sister. But even though we were in Wisconsin, we still did the Minnesota Goodbye!

Do you know what the 'Minnesota Goodbye' is? Well, it's essentially a long, drawn-out phenomenon that extends the process of saying goodbye into one that's much longer that it really should be.

Urban Dictionary.com explains it like this: "When one person has to leave, they proceed to talk for another hour, then the departing party is walked to the front door, where they talk for another hour, then the departing party gets walked to their car while the host family talks to them through the car window for an hour, and finally the departing couple SLOWLY departs down the drive, yelling back & forth with the host family."

Now, that might sound like a bit of an exaggeration, but in my family, it's pretty spot-on-- and we're not even from Minnesota! Yesterday afternoon, I mentioned to my brother that we should probably get started on the four-hour drive back to Minnesota (he lives in St. Louis Park, so we met up in the cities and then car-pooled back to Wausau, Wis.). But, it was just about an hour later when we finally got on the road!

That's right, we started saying goodbye upstairs, then talked some more. We then collected our stuff and talked some more. We finally made it out to the driveway, and proceeded to talk some more. Like I said, it took about an entire hour to make our Minnesota Goodbye!

Does your family do the Minnesota Goodbye? This video explains the phenomenon...