The Perfect Duluth Day Archives for September 2003 feature a number of posts about the Nonchalant Jaunt, an event in which seven hearty PDDers walked the length of Duluth, from the Wabegon Supper Club in the Superior Township to the Lakeview Castle in the Duluth Township.

This video is a little deceptive in a number of ways.

1) It makes it seem like yours truly, Paul Lundgren, was the only person walking the full distance. I came up with the idea, but six other people completed the walk: Scott “Starfire” Lunt, Nick Lamon, Zoey Cohen, Cathie Ehle, John Bankson and Maria Danz.

2) I was identified as a columnist for the Ripsaw newspaper, which I was, but this event was totally a PDD thing.

3) You might recognize some people in the video and assume they were on the walk, too, but if I didn’t already mention them then they are people who jumped in with us for a few blocks as we walked downtown. (It should also be noted that Barrett Chase completed a big chunk of the walk, but he had to go to work after we stopped for breakfast at the Sunshine Cafe.)

4) Although it’s mentioned that there was a plan at the time to consolidate Duluth’s three high schools into one, and the jaunt demonstrates how long of a walk to school it would be for a kid from Fond du Lac to walk to Central High School, this only came up because I was pressed by the reporter for a rationale for the walk. In reality, we just wanted to do it for kicks.

The PDD archive looks like it includes several audio blog posts from Starfire that were phoned in during the walk, but the service that was used to post those items must have went out of business or something, because the audio is gone.

Another PDD-related event that month was Eric and Patty Swanson’s Labor Day Weekend Croquet Tournament at the water reservoir on 15th Avenue East, which produced the famous “flying weiner” photo. I showed up late and left early, but I seem to remember the police got involved in this or something.

And now the part where I get repeaty.

Perfect Duluth Day is more than ten years old now, and most of you reading it today are not familiar with how it was back in the day. So, when we link to 2003 material it seems only polite to mention the following:

It was a time when Facebook didn’t exist and the word “blog” was still a year away from being named Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year.

PDD was used among a small group of friends when it started and was supported by a different publishing platform (Blogger). The archives are getting sloppier all the time as more and more of the images that were hosted on other sites disappear and old websites that were linked to die off.

Blogger didn’t support commenting in those days, but there were comments on PDD, supported by a company that went out of business years ago, which means all the comments from those posts on Blogger are long lost.

For those of you who were part of PDD back then, there is enough left in the archives to spark old memories of the way it was. The rest of you might be confused.