Monday, October 22, 2012

 Monday morning!!  Up at 8, shower and out the door for our massages!!!  Once we arrive, however, we have disappointing news. One of the massage therapists has called in sick and one of either needs to give up our appointment or take an appointment AFTER the other, rather than simultaneously.  I feel that this will just eat up too much of our day (and it is an overcast but warm day out....a perfect zoo day), so I let go of my appointment so that Kathi can get a massage.  It has been a bit of a rough morning for Kathi because Ridley is having a very rough morning and has been on the phone with Kathi much of the morning, so I feel that Kathi could use the massage and relaxation much more than I.  So I leave Kathi and the massage place and I go to put gas in the car and do a little solo exploring.  I was hoping to come across a mall or a Starbuck's or something along those lines where I could go and kill some time browsing stores or reading and having a cup of coffee.  I drove around for most of an hour and pretty much came up with NOTHING, so I just headed back to the massage place and waited until Kathi was done.

Kathi needed a few more supplies from the local Michael's store for her wedding album, so we found Michael's and she made her purchases then went in search of something to eat before the zoo, because, in our experience, the food and the zoo, ANY zoo, generally consists of pizza, hamburger, hot dogs and fries, is expensive and just doesn't sound very appealing! On the path to the zoo we see an place called Chapada that we decide to check out.  Turns out it serves Brazilian food, which I have not experienced before.  The menu is mainly meat dishes and mainly beef dishes.  Kathi chooses a chicken sandwich and I choose steak tacos.  All of it is quite tasty and leaves us very satisfied.  Next stop, the zoo!

The zoo turned out to be quite delightful and, as I said earlier, the weather was perfect for a zoo day.  Warm enough to wear just a light jacket, but not so hot that the animals were all too hot to be active.  We arrived around 2pm and only had 3 hours until closing so we never really made it out of Africa (the zoo is arranged by continents) but we really enjoyed watching the animals that we did see.  We first encountered the giraffes, who were lazily munching on their lunch, then moved on to the rhinos, hippos and elephants.  One of the elephants was very entertaining and we spent quite a bit of time watching him.  There was a chain in the enclosure that was connected to a log at one end and a large umbrella/canopy type structure at the other.  He had lifted the loose part of the chain up over his head where it was resting when we came upon him and he was eating hay from the piles that had been strewn about the enclosure.  He also had one pile of hay up on his back.  After munching for a while he backed up and allowed the chain to slide off of his head, then he picked it back up with his trunk and stuck it in his mouth and chewed on it for a while.  Dental floss, maybe???  Then he shook all over, like a dog, knocking the pile of straw that had been on his back to the ground which he then promptly went to, picked up and ate.  Dessert, perhaps??  From the entertainment of the elephant we moved on to zebras, Red River hogs, meer kats (who stunk to high heaven, by the way!) and a few other that I am not remembering.  Then on to the gorillas, which are definitely my favorite.   

We must have spent at least an hour, if not more, watching the gorillas.  There were 4 gorillas in the enclosure and the were not only active, but were very interactive with those of us who were watching them through the plexiglass windows.  They would come and sit right by the windows close to someone who was sitting on the other side and peer in at us curiously.  Some, I would swear, would sit and pose for pictures.  Occasionally, one would run around the enclosure, beat on his or her chest then run up to the window, slap it, spin around and run away.  I found them to be quite charming.

We stayed with the gorillas until it was time to leave, then we headed back to the hotel.  We snacked on cheese and crackers and salami once back in the room along with finishing up the bottle of Bailey's and most of the wine.  Kathi continued working on her wedding album, but did turn on the WBNA finals on the TV because the Indiana Fever were playing and she wanted to watch.  THEY WON!!!  I called my mom and chatted with her for a while like I do every year at some point or another while on Girls Weekend, just to catch up and let her know what were doing.

After the game was over and before we went to bed, we pulled one state out of the last three left to determine next year's destination.  Kathi let me do the drawing.  I shook the pitcher up well before drawing and pulled out.............................

I AM SO EXCITED!!!!  Finally, a state that I can drive to!!  Washington!!  Lots of opportunities here for cool places to go.  Will probably do a little of Seattle as well as spending some time at the WorldMark Resort in Leavenworth, Washington, which is cute little Bavarian-themed town that I have been wanting to check out for a long time.

Kathi actually turned in a bit earlier tonight than I did.  I think the stress and worry over Ridley took a bit of a toll on her and she was pretty tired.  I stayed up and watched the most current episode of Homeland on my computer (my latest TV addiction) before turning in myself.


Good night!

Sunday, October 21, 2012

Sunday morning already!!!  How can that be?  We want to make the most of the day, so we get up around 8:30 or so with a plan to have brunch in the lobby of our beautiful hotel before we go to see the Tall Grass Film Festival film of our choice.  The lobby has a courtyard feel to it with a fountain and with balconies off of some of the rooms that look into it.  After our brunch of scrambled eggs, sausage, fruit and yogurt, we walk the few blocks from the hotel to the beautiful Scottish Rite Auditorium

where the film we have chosen, Call Me Kuchu, is playing.  Call Me Kuchu  is a heartbreaking film about a bill that is currently being argued in Uganda that threatens to make homosexuality punishable by death.  It is an eye-opening and thought provoking look at how homosexuals are treated elsewhere and, in my opinion, it is quite tragic.

 Upon leaving the movie we decided that we wanted to sit outside somewhere and finish, or in my case attempt to finish, Lean on Pete, the book that Kathi's book club read this past month and is meeting today to discuss.  Kathi was only about 50 pages away from finishing, while I was more like 150 pages away from the end.  This required a trip back to the room so that Kathi could get her book, then we settled in at the Caffe Moderne for some iced coffee, gelato and reading.   Does life get any better than this??

Kathi succeeded in finishing the book, I didn't even come close, but we went back to the room around 4:30 so that we would be available to join in the book club discussion when we got the call, which happened around 5:15.  This book choice was Deidre's and she chose it upon recommendation from a friend of hers as well as having read many positive reviews of the book.  I would say, however, from the discussion, that the book was not a favorite amongst this group of readers.  The beauty of a book club, however, in my opinion, is that you find yourself reading books that you most likely would never have chosen to read on your own and this exposure helps one to expand their reading horizons.

After hanging up with the book club, we realized that we had forgotten to toss the states the night before so I began to search for the puzzle pieces at which point we both had an "aha" moment in which we realized that we left the puzzle pieces in the room at the Marriott in Tulsa!!!  OH NO!!  Kathi called the Marriott and asked that they do a search and find out if housekeeping had found them and if they were in a lost and found somewhere.  Kathi asked that we get a call back tomorrow, one way or the other.   Hopefully they were not thrown away.  These are the original puzzle pieces that we have been using for annual toss since we bought the puzzle on our 5th trip back in Washington, DC.  One year I did forget to bring them and we had to buy another puzzle (NOT wooden) to make due.  That puzzle has been designated as our back up, but Kathi did not have those pieces with her because she was unable to locate them in her house, which is in flux due to Eric moving in once they got married.  So, we did what we do so well and improvised.

Fortunately we have a photo of the 6 states that were left after the last toss made on our last night in Tulsa, so we just wrote the name of each of those states on individual pieces of paper, threw them into a pitcher provided with our room and drew out half of them.  Here are the states that are left.  North Carolina, Washington and North Dakota.

Having already demolished our leftovers from last night's dinner, we made a run to the grocery store for some cheese and crackers and various other "snackie" items to eat in the room while we browsed the internet on our computers, worked on journaling and photo albums.  I journaled a little bit for the blog and found myself very sleepy, so decided to go ahead and go to bed after watching a bit of Grimm on my computer.  Kathi stayed up until about 2:30 am continuing to work on her wedding album, which she is determined to done on this trip and once Kathi makes up her mind to do something, there is pretty much no stopping her!

We set our alarms for 8 in the morning so that we can get up in time to get ready for our massages that we have scheduled for tomorrow at 10 am.  Then we plan on going to the zoo if the weather is nice.

Good night!

October 20th, 2012

Today is a travel day!!  We leave our digs in Tulsa and head 3 hours northwest to Wichita, Kansas for the remainder of the trip.  Before leaving Tulsa, however, we decided to do a little shopping for our families at the TJMaxx store that we had spotted during our outing yesterday.  We stop first at Panera for a bit of breakfast/lunch and some coffee as well as a stop at Michael's for Kathi to get some supplies to work on wedding photo book.  TJMaxx turned out to be a GREAT place for us to do gift shopping for our friends and family.  Lots of local team shirts and sweatshirts at very good prices.  This is something that we MUST remember on all of our trips from this point forward, if there is a TJMaxx, we should shop there!  After a successful shopping experience we hit the highway for the drive to Wichita.

Kathi turned on her reliable GPS program on her iPhone and we successfully arrived in Wichita around  6:30 pm.  Upon finding our hotel here in Wichita, I breathed a sigh of relief, because I was beginning to think I had made a mistake in planning for us to spend MORE of our time here than in Tulsa, but the hotel I booked us into here is VERY charming and sits in the middle of Old Town Wichita.

Old Town Wichita is a several block area of old industrial buildings that have been reclaimed and restored into shops, restaurants, bars, museums and theaters.  The streets are all paved with brick.  It becomes very lively at night with all the bars and restaurants and everything attracting lots of people.  Once we checked into our room we made our way to the local liquor store to stock up on wine and Bailey's Irish Cream.  What a charming liquor store! Great building and the two ladies working in there were very chatty and nice and gave us recommendations for places to eat.  We also found out that there is a film festival going on in town this weekend and while one side of the building that the liquor store is located in is the liquor store, the other side is a photography studio that is transformed into a small theater for the duration of the film festival.  Love it!!  Kathi was very excited to find out about the film festival since she is missing the Heartland film festival back in Indianapolis while we are here.  We made a decision right then and there to look over the available films and choose one to go to tomorrow.  We made our purchases at the liquor store; a couple of bottles of wine, a bottle of Bailey's along with a couple of bottles of tequila that I bought for Tom.  There was one particular wine at this shop that we had not seen anywhere else and we decided we should get.................just because we like the bottle and the name!!

We decided that Italian food sounded like just the ticket so we headed a couple of blocks away to Luca, one of the places recommended by both the ladies at the liquor store as well as the staff at the front desk of the hotel.  Kathi ordered the Chicken Saltimbocca with a side of parmesan risotto, while I ordered the Chicken Limone with a side of butter sage gnocchi.  OH MY GOSH!!!  Absolutely scrumptious.  We each ate half of our servings and boxed up the second half to have for lunch tomorrow.  Now that we had satisfied our appetites we walked back to the hotel and up to the room where we opened both the Bailey's (for Lori) and the bottle of Bitch wine (for Kathi) and settled in for the evening.  After about an hour of catching up on Facebook, e-mail and doing a little typing on this journal, I began to get pretty sleepy (a fully tummy and a little alcohol do that to me), so I decided that I would lay down and take a little nap.

Kathi, however, stayed up until nearly 5 am working on her wedding photo album as well as taking pictures of me taking my nap, which, by the way, lasted until 8:30am.  Thanks, Kath, I really appreciate you getting such a flattering photo of me!  ;-).  So, in return, I am going to share my favorite photo of you so far on this trip.

More tomorrow!!!  Good night, all.

October 19, 2012

I am laughing as I look at this picture of Kathi and I at the entrance to the Tulsa Oktoberfest with the outline of a person on the ground behind us and the shadow of our photographer also visible.  A professional photographer would probably be absolutely horrified by this picture, but it captures the moment and that is what I love about it.  Kathi and I have become pros at asking people to take pictures of us together on our trips, so this shadow represents ALL those people who, over the years have been willing to take a moment to help us perserve our memories.

So, Friday morning we slept in a bit, since we had both been so tired the night before, but once we were up and moving and ready to go we left the hotel room in search of boots for Kathi, souvenirs for our loved ones, and Oktoberfest.  In our research of the area we discovered that there was a mall located fairly close to us, so that's where we headed in search of a pair of boots for Kathi.  Across from the mall was a DSW store that Kathi wanted to visit first, so we parked the car and in we went.  Oh my gosh..........boot heaven.  I think we hit the motherlode.  After trying on many pairs of boots, Kathi finally chose a pair (which fit her in an entire size smaller than she has worn in years!) and off we went to the mall.  First stop, the food court.  By this time we were starving.  We chose a place serving up hummus, pita bread, tabour and gyros.  Once we had some fuel in us, we headed for the stores. Megan has been longing for a particular sweatshirt that is only available at Zumiez and there happened to be one in this mall, so we made that our first stop and were successful in finding and purchasing the desired sweatshirt.  We also spent quite a long time in The Body Shop and came away smelling quite yummy as well as purchasing a number of "lotions and potions", as I call them, to keep our skin smooth and supple and to attempt to ward off signs of aging.  From the mall we sought out and found a nearby Jamba Juice to treat ourselves to a pumpkin smash, a frozen yogurt and pumpkin delight that completely filled our tummies up.  Next stop:  Tulsa Oktoberfest!

The Tulsa Oktoberfest is said to be one of the best in the country and is held in a park that borders the Arkansas River which runs through the middle of downtown Tulsa.  Before going to the Oktoberfest, we drove around downtown Tulsa a little bit because Kathi had been reading something that told us that Tulsa has one of the largest concentrations of art deco architecture in the United States and we wanted to check out some of the buildings. Of course, we first had to figure out just what exactly is meant by "art deco" so that we knew what the heck we were looking for!  So, as described by Wikipedia, "At its best, art deco represented elegance, glamour, functionality,and modernity." The  picture to the right is one of the buildings in downtown Tulsa which was built in the art deco style.  So lots of symmetry and attention to details.  Really quite beautiful.

One note I want to make here is about the complete lack of traffic in downtown Tulsa at 5pm.  I mean, seriously, there was hardly anyone in the downtown area, it was weird.  However they do have a street in downtown Tulsa that is named Heavy Traffic Way.  What???????

After spotting and admiring some of the art deco structures in the downtown, we crossed the river and parked to walk to the Oktoberfest celebration.  We got there somewhere between 5 and 6 pm and there really wasn't much of a crowd yet so we were able to walk around quite freely without encountering crowds of people.  Our Jamba Juice pumpkin smashes still sat heavily in our stomachs so we weren't really ready yet for beer or food, which is really what much of Oktoberfest is about, nor were we really very interested in the carnival rides set up, so we walked around amongst the 4 tents set up with stages just to get a feel for what was going on.  The 3rd tent we got to had belly dancers performing and Kathi and I stopped and watched for about an hour or so and were quite fascinated with the performances.  We both decided that belly dancing could, possibly, be in our futures!  

Once the belly dancing performance was over, we moved on to the tents that held the arts and crafts portion of the festival where we looked at jewelry, hand made soaps, clothing and other handcrafted items.  We made a few purchases in these tents then started meandering back through the music tents.  By this time the crowd had grown exponentially and we noticed that many people were drinking their beer straight out of the pitchers.  That's right, not cups, straight out of the pitchers.  Oh my gosh,  there are going to be a LOT of very drunk people at the end of the evening!!  So as we were walking through the main tent a band started playing on stage there and people started climbing up on to the tables to dance.  I had never seen such a thing at any festival I have been to in the past.





As we were moving amongst the tents and walking around the grounds of the festival we came upon the tent in which a group of people were making schnitzel and Kathi and I started watching them make it and, of course, Kathi did as Kathi does and started watching the entire process and became totally fascinated by it and started asking questions because she wants to prepare this at home.  I think we stood there and watched and talked with these people for close to an hour and, because we didn't crack any jokes about "beating meat" (which is part of the process of making schnitzel), as many of the drunk observers apparently do, we were offered free samples, and it tasted delicious.  So, even though we weren't really all that hungry, we decided that we needed a full serving of schniztel and that it was time to get ourselves some Oktoberfest beer.  We went around to the front of the schniztel tent to make our purchase, only to find out that we needed tickets to make food and beer purchases.  After finding a booth to buy tickets and having our IDs checked so that we could bracelets allowing us to purchase beer, we went back to the schniztel tent, got our delicious, freshly made schnitzel, chose a tent where we could sit and eat and buy a beer.  

The band in this particular tent was not playing German music, but, instead was a rock and roll cover band with a bit of R & B thrown in.  The emcee of the evening, after introducing the band would occasionally hop up on a table and do a bit of dancing in an effort to encourage others to do the same.  Of course, after a bit, Kathi and I did indeed, join in the fun.




We each had one beer apiece, did a bit of dancing on the table and decided that we were ready to go back to our motel room.  We parked in a parking lot that was a short walk away from the fairgrounds and required us to walk along the river on the river walk.  It was a beautiful evening and we took a nice picture of the Tulsa skyline.

Once back in the room I did a bit of journaling and internet surfing while Kathi did some work on her wedding photo album.  We somehow managed to stay up until 3:30am just putzing around before we decided to turn in for the night.

As always, we had great day and look forward to tomorrow!!!

Girls Weekend 2012, October 18

Livin' on Tulsa Time........Oh yes, it is that time again.....Girls Weekend.  And, as promised at the end of last year's trip, I am writing this while lying in bed in our hotel room in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, just so you know, it is illegal to bring an elephant into the downtown area, and where a bartender cannot allow you to pretend to have sex with a buffalo while in the bar (tidbits of info found on an Oklahoma trivia website....you didn't really think I just made that up, did you?)

Kathi and I arrived in Tulsa to a windy 70 degree day.  When researching Tulsa for this trip I was unable to come up with that fun, funky, unique kind of place to stay that I am always looking for, so I opted for a Marriott Courtyard hotel close to the airport.  I wanted something downtown, but couldn't find anything that looked interesting that was in our price range, so here we are.  Once we got to the room, we settled in for a while and talked and caught up with what is going on in one another's lives.  This past year has been a year of some MAJOR changes for us both.  Kathi got married (to a wonderful man, I must add) and Tucker and Ridley have both moved to other cities to go to school.  Tucker, to Las Vegas, to go to Bible College  (which sounds totally weird, I know) and Ridley to Chicago to attend Columbia College Chicago.  So, we had lots of things to talk about and get up to date on.  When our stomachs starting talking to us, we decided it was time to look for a place to eat. We browsed through a book on Tulsa that Kathi bought and decided that our first meal here would be at an Irish pub called Kilkenny's.

Kathi ordered something called a kilmacow boxty, which consisted of a potato pancake wrapped around seared beef, slow-cooked with portobello mushrooms and herbs and topped with Irish whiskey sauce.  Kathi said it was interesting, unique and delicious.  I went non-Irish and had spinach tortellini with an herbed cream sauce, that was also delicious.  While we were waiting for our entrees to arrive we ordered drinks, Kathi a lemon drop martini and I ordered something that I cannot remember the name of but it had creme de menthe, Bailey's Irish Creme and vodka (I think).  The drink tasted wonderful, but the color was kind of disgusting (an oogie green).  Once our bellies were full and we had a bit of alchohol in us, we both realized that we were very, very tired and we headed back to the room where, after the tossing of the states, we fell into our beds and to sleep.