Catching Up Again......

Well, I've missed a lot of fun stuff since I wrote last, but I'm gonna do my best to catch you all up. This past weekend Ryan and I enjoyed a quick trip to southern Indiana. First stop was Oliver Winery just outside of Bloomington on state road 37. It is so beautiful there. This picture is just outside the entrance. It is always decorated really nice during the fall. Lots of good photo ops, although my batteries in my camera died while we were there. Boo.......





We got a few though.After sampling several different wines, we decided to buy a bottle of Gewürztraminer (pronounced gov-ertz-tra-mee-nor) to take with us on the rest of our trip. It is one of my favorites from Oliver. It's kind of a semi-sweet white wine. I am realizing more and more that I don't like the sweeter wines like I originally thought. My favorite here lately has been Chardonnay..........LOVE IT!!!!We walked around the winery for a little while before taking off to French Lick for the evening. The weather was gorgeous. It was cloudy on the way down, but by the time we got there, the sun had just barely peeked through the clouds. It was plenty warm to spend some time outside. We really enjoyed our time there.



Later that evening, we went to the casino in French Lick to see David Crosby and Graham Nash. The show was great. They still sound so good together. Their harmonies gave me chills. The casino was really nice, but it wasn't the greatest place to see a concert. It was very fancy, and for a show where people won't be getting up and moving around much, it would be fine. However, for me, it's hard to stay in my chair during a concert...........I wanted to dance!!!!!!!





I finally got brave and jumped up and ran to the front of the stage for the last song. After all, David Crosby told us to get up. I was just doing what I was told!! Apparently the lady in the front row who pushed me out of her view didn't hear David send out that invitation. She was totally pissed that there were people standing in front of her. I wasn't pissed until she touched me. Honestly, I wanted to deck her in the jaw, but I decided that would be a bad idea.All in all, it was a wonderful show. Short but sweet!!!





After they got done playing, Ryan and I went down to the casino for a little while. We had a couple drinks and walked around checking out the sights. There is a slot machine that I love and always look for whenever I'm at a casino. It's called Texas Tea..It's my favorite!!! So, we walked around and looked for one of those. They had one in the main casino and one in the non-smoking area, so we stalked the people on both of those machines for awhile in hopes of one opening up. While we were stalking in the non-smoking section, we decided to sit down and drop some cash in a Wheel of Fortune slot. I put a twenty in, bet a dollar a couple times, and then decided to get really crazy and play the max bet. It was three bucks. I hit $250.00 just like that, and then I was done!!! I cashed out and told Ryan I was ready to go whenever he was.





We walked around for a few more minutes and eventually a Texas Tea machine opened up, so we swooped in and sat down there for a few minutes. After about ten minutes and almost forty dollars, we decided we were done and ready to go. Yeah!!!!!!!!!I always love all the fancy decor in the casinos. The carpet and drapes are always so gaudy, but gorgeous at the same time!! There were some really cool paintings in the halls by the elevators, so we stopped for a couple shots there.We drove down to a small town called Huntingburg to spend the night after the show. We didn't realize how beautiful it was until we got up the next morning. We ended up getting up early enough to enjoy some breakfast, believe it or not :-) and then we hit the road again. We were hoping to get home by 2:30 so we could go to our friends' Rory and Allison's wedding.



We left Huntingburg at about 9:30 and took the scenic route home. We got up to Kokomo just in time for the wedding.I absolutely love being on the road. It was perfect timing in planning our trip to southern Indiana for this time of year. The trees are all starting to change and the weather is still warm enough to get out and walk around. It was perfect!!! It will probably be even prettier in a week or two. A lot of the trees are still green, but the few that have changed that were poking through were brilliant. I'm always tinkering with my camera when we go somewhere, so of course I had to play paparrazzi while we were in the car. Luckily, Ryan's a really good driver and has learned to handle me leaning all over him and snapping pictures all the time.

When we got home, we had about twenty minutes to let the dogs out and get over to Rory and Allison's wedding. They got married at Camp Tyconey and Clint married them.

Some of you may not know, but Clint is an ordained minister, so he has married a few of our friends. I really wish we would have thought about our wedding for longer than twelve hours so we could have had him marry us too. That's OK, it worked out perfect anyway......

Allison's parents used to own the restaraunt called A WONG'S here in Kokomo, so we all had really good Chinese food for the reception. It was such a perfect ceremony for the two of them. It was very casual. In fact, Rory bought tuxedo t-shirts for all his groomsmen. He he he.......
This is Allison and her grandfather. She wore socks with skulls and cross bones and big clunky red shoes with a fancy black dress. It's a little different, but totally her :-)There were so many people there who hadn't run into eachother for years. It was a fun crowd. We apparently have a lot of mutual friends that I never realized we had. I saw a lot more familiar faces than I thought I would there.

I'm not a mushy person normally, but the vows that Clint wrote for them were really touching. I almost cried a couple different times. The picture above is Rory hugging his mom. Seeing his parents tearing up really got to me. Rory is a big softy too, so he was crying.......OMG it was so freaking emotional............but it was wonderful all at the same time.Their cake was pretty cool. They had a statue with Fu Dogs on the top of it. The Fu Dogs are the statues of dogs that look similar to lions. They are symbols of protection and often sit at the entrance of builings in Asia.

I was so happy their wedding was on a Sunday. It was perfect timing for us to make it since we had the show in French Lick the night before. I hope Rory and Allison have a long happy life together. I hope they realize how much all of the guest enjoyed themselves too. it was so great to see everyone.

I still have pictures from our party at Bankowski's house a few weeks ago. Maybe I'll post those next...............