Family, BBQ, Baseball and Ice Cream.

Friday morning I ended up working at a client’s office for an Emergency repair. It’s not really how I wanted to start off the holiday, but it only took me an hour or so to fix the issue. For a bonus they gave me 4 tickets to the Reds on Sunday. Later that day we headed over to Kurt and Kate’s house for a family cookout. It was great seeing the cousins again. Continuing our search for the best soft serve in Cincinnati we headed over to the west side of town to a place called Zip’s. After a 30 minute drive we were a bit disappointed and gave the place a solid C. On the plus side we found 2 more whippy dips to try in the upcoming weeks. Off to see fireworks and the night was complete.

Saturday started early as we were heading out to a local farm to pick blueberries. This is something I haven’t done since Oregon. Amy’s Mom, Sharon, joined us for the fun. Between the 3 of us we picked almost 10 pounds of blue berries. I'm still not sure what I’m going to do with my share. Some people there were walking out with 15+ pounds. I sure would like to know what they are planning to do with all these blueberries. We ended up having breakfast with Todd, Amy’s Brother, and his family.

Saturday night ended up being date night. I guess Amy had been missing this lately since she blocked the time off on my calendar. She’s getting pretty good at doing this =) Keeping up with the fun from Chicago, we decided to try 3 different places. Drinks were at a new wine bar right next door to the restaurant. The main meal was at a place I’ve wanted to try for 6 months called Mesh. While desert was simple ice cream at Cold Stone. The meal at Mesh was fantastic. I now have 3 or 4 recipes I’m going to try and recreate. Our favorite was the sweet potatoes and apple hash. The waitress picked up that Amy and I were talking about our upcoming 1 year anniversary. At the end of the meal she brought out 3 freshly made cookies to say thanks for celebrating with them. It was a nice and unexpected touch.

Sunday was spent at the Reds game. It ended up being a beautiful day to watch the game. The seats were fantastic right along the 1st base line. To top off the Reds actually won the game; although they did their best to lose.

Our simple holiday weekend here in the Cincy ended up being one that I’ll remember for a while.

Till next time,
P

Lessons Learned!

We had a non refundable reservation, a packed pop-up camper, a cooler full of food, and a weather report that looked horrible. Being that this is our first camping trip together what could go wrong?

The trip to Lake Monroe, Indiana started out great, clear skies and light traffic. It was supposed to be a quick 3 hour drive Friday after work. The first snag was from Google maps. Google decided it would be much better to take very small farm roads and save 5 miles vs. taking the larger state routes. Amy was doing a fantastic job navigating us to the destination until a key bridge was out with no detour signs listed. No problem I’ll just pull out my trusty road atlas. Opps, it looks like I forgot to pack it. So we have 2 choices; backtrack for 30 minutes or push forward. Normally I’m all for trying to find alternate routes, but I have no idea where we were and it was starting to getting dark. We decided to press our luck and find our own detour. 20 minutes later and we were back on track with 2 lessons learned. #1 don’t trust Google maps and #2 always pack a road atlas!

Pulling into the campground; it’s now pouring down rain and pitch black out. So much for our luck holding. :( Being the gentleman that I am; I gave Amy the option of either backing the camper into the site or standing out in the pouring rain to give me directions. I’m such a nice guy. At least she had an umbrella. =) . After a few tries we finally had the camper in the spot and level.

Now we can move onto my 3rd and 4th lesson learned. Amy and I had a deal before we left. I take care of the outside setup and she does the inside stuff. Thinking that this was no big deal I immediately said sure. This deal was running through my mind as our heavy rain is turning into a full blown thunderstorm. Amy was a good sport about it though. She held the light for me as I’m franticly running around and setting up all the supports and unhooking the truck. The whole time I’m kicking myself for not packing my waterproof jacket. In the end we did pretty well. It only took us about 20 minutes to get everything set up. Not bad for some first timers in the dark and in the middle of a thunderstorm. It was still long enough to be soaked to the bone though. :(

Day 2 started of much better. The skies were starting to clear. Everything was water logged around the camp site, so we figured hiking was out. We decided to head down to Nashville Indiana. It’s a quaint little town about 20 minutes from the campground. It kind of reminded me of Gatlinburg about 15 years ago; before all the tourist traps opened for business. With a couple of local wineries in town and lots of cool shops it was pretty easy to kill a few hours. Walking past a jerky store Amy made the mistake of saying that she has never tried jerky before. Luckily this store offered free tastings. They offered a variety of different types from ostrich to salmon.

Board with shopping; it was time to do a little bike riding around the state park and camp ground. This gave us a great chance to check out how others set up their camp sites. We learned that people take great pride in setting up their sites. Some people even went so far as sweeping off leaves from the camp site paths. Seeing our pathetic excuse for a campsite, some of the neighbors felt sorry for us and invited us over for ice cream and homemade cobbler. So lesson #5: Neighbors will take pity on you if your site is not up to standards.

Day #3 was nice and uneventful. We spent much of the morning breaking down the camp site and organizing things. The morning passed quickly and we were heading back to Cincinnati. No new lessons learned today. =)

While we wished the trip started off better it ended up being a fantastic weekend. We had lotsof laughs, some frustration and gathered some much needed experience for the upcoming camping trip to New York in August.

Till Next Time,

P and A