Trip to Cincinnati

I received an invitation to a baby shower a few weeks ago.  It was for my cousin's son, Adam and his wife, Chris. They are an adorable couple who will make great parents.  The shower was themed as Burgers, Beer and Baby talk and it was for couples, not just women which made it even cooler.  So I instantly told my husband that I was going.  I told him he was also invited and it would be nice if he would come along, but I didn't expect him to if he really didn't want to.  His response was, "so you're telling me you're going, not asking if we should go?" I said yes, that's it exactly. So he was in.  He goes pretty much everywhere I go so I wasn't surprised. 

I do think he thought I was crazy for wanting to drive 5-plus hours to go to a party and then the next day drive over 5 hours back. But it was important to me.  I knew my aunt and uncle would be there and I want every chance to spend time with them.  We're all getting older, and I worry sometimes about my own mortality, as well as theirs. So I got us a cheap hotel close by and off we went. 

We left very early in the morning and as we drove and calculated our ETA, we realized we forgot to include the time change to Eastern. So we were going to be an hour late. Too bad we took our time when we stopped for breakfast but we thought we had plenty of time built in.  Oh well.

We got there and things were just starting to get rolling.  It was great to see my Aunt Florence, Uncle Ray, cousin Michelle and Chris and her beautiful daughter, Marissa and my cousin Terry and her husband Bob.  They have great kids, their oldest daughter Erika has four adorable children of her own and a really nice husband.  Their son, Adam is so polite and friendly and his new wife is the same. They also have a son, Greg who is really cool to talk to.  The shower went well and after it ended we stayed until the wee hours of the night.  We got back to our hotel after 1 am.  It was a great time and Jeff admitted that even though he balked about all that driving, he was very glad he decided to come along. 

We got up on Sunday and were invited back for breakfast, which again turned into a marathon event where we finally left at 1 pm.  We knew this meant we were not going to get home until after 8 since we were making a few stops along the way.  Our first stop was to the Disney Store at the outlet mall.  I got my granddaughters each a princess dress and a princess doll.  The discount prices were wonderful.  If it weren't for me being unemployed I would have bought much, much more. After we left the outlet mall we headed over to a crazy store called Jungle Jim's.  It was an international grocery store with an amazing selection of everything you never knew existed. We stopped and sampled some olives at the olive bar in the Greek section and stopped at the cheese bar and sampled some cheeses in the deli.  What a store.  We were getting tired so after picking up some cheeses we headed over to the section that we came for....beer!  There was a beer sampling bar.  For a quarter a sample, we tried many beers however, we came for the Yuengling so that's what we got.  We bought a case of the traditional lager and a case of the light lager.  On our way to the checkouts I saw the Grippo's potato chips. Like the Yuengling, we can't get those here in Wisconsin so we got a box of those as well.  One of my coworkers from the south ships them up to our office during the holidays as a treat.  They are so very good. So we paid for our items and started the trek home.


At Catch 22

I drove to Cincinnati and Jeff drove back.  We weren't sure he could drive since he just had hand surgery but he was ok with it.  We stopped within 2 hours of home for some dinner at a cool sports bar & grill called Catch 22 in Merrillville, Indiana.  The food was good and it was good to sit back and relax from the stress (and boredom) of a long drive.  Especially since we had to sit in slow-moving traffic due to an accident in a construction zone.  At least it only slowed us down for 20 minutes, the traffic going in the opposite direction was stopped dead because all the lanes heading south were closed while they cleaned up the crash site-we were just down to one lane.  The food was good and the rest at the bar was definitely a good break for the rest of the ride home. When we got into Chicago it started to rain which made the worst section of the drive that much worse.  We pulled into our driveway at 9:30, so glad to be home. 

The Yuengling will have to wait until morning to be carried into the house.