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.