right now | october 2013

Watching Scandal Season 3 and Top Chef New Orleans and tons of documentaries.
(Also, some really terrible guilty pleasure TV that shall go unnamed.)
Listening to Lissie's excellent new album, Back to Forever.
Roadtripping through Kentucky.

Sleeping in a concrete wigwam.

Drinking bourbon.

Annoyed that the government shutdown caused the national parks to be closed.

Wearing plaid for the first time since my high school grunge phase.

Dreaming about sewing more quilts as the weather gets golder.
Eating tons of tacos! Our new favorite taco joint: Taco Bamba in Falls Church.
Stuffing our faces with pimento cheese and lots of falafel.
Excited about our new travel map.
Thrilled that Art on the Avenue was a successful market for my shop.
Tasting new beers at Snallygaster.
Wishing we could spend three weeks in Asheville next year seeing shows at The Orange Peel.
Loving Uniqlo's leggings pants - so comfortable, they're like maternity pants for your food baby!
Enjoying the first fire in our (gas) fireplace.
Frustrated that it's so difficult to find a good pet sitter.
Dressing Gravy like a lady. ;)
Considering becoming a weekday vegetarian.
Concerned about what stress is doing to my health after watching Stress: Portrait of a Killer.
Making care packages for new parents that include pie, beer, and fart jokes.
Riding in style thanks to Uber.
Rocking out (ok, ok, watching the band rock out) to Frightened Rabbit at 930 Club.
Socializing and wine tasting with my small business friends.
(And playing with power tools while we're at it - stole that pic from Jane.)
Hugging (Lauree) like I mean it.
Sniffing Steffanie's delicious soaps.
Suffering from a nasty cold/sore throat/fever/allergy combo.
Medicating myself with boozy milkshakes.
Avoiding trick-or-treaters.
Missing carving jack-o-lanterns.
Wondering where the month went.
Thankful that my mom knows just when to show up with an apple crisp straight from the oven.

four hours in nashville

Nashville has been one of my favorite cities since Larry and I first visited in 2008. In fact, we've often talked of moving there over the past five years. It has a lot of things going for it, in my opinion: 1. I have a ton of family who live there. 2. It is a really manageably-sized city: Plenty of things to do, good places to eat, etc, yet it's still very drivable and walkable and not overwhelming. 3. Live music everywhere!

Anyway, during our road trip with friends earlier this month, we spent two nights in Cave City, Kentucky. We stayed there so we could visit Mammoth Cave National Park, but due to the federal government shutdown, the park was closed. Wop wop. There's not a whole lot to do in Cave City, but we did our best to make the most of it: we went to Dinosaur World, and toured Diamond Caverns. But once we had done those things, we found ourselves with a whole afternoon free and nothing left to do in southern Kentucky other than sit in our concrete wigwams and drink beer. That was going to get old fast, so we decided to drive 90 miles south and hang out in Nashville for a few hours.

It was a great decision: In four hours, we ate popsicles at Las Paletas (I've been dreaming of these popsicles since my cousin introduced me to them years ago - the creamy avocado was amazing!), shopped for CDs at Ernest Tubb's, walked down Broadway in search of beer and music, sat in Layla's honky tonk and listened to Sarah Gayle Meech and her band, shopped for cowboy boots, and had a fabulous dinner at Flyte.








As we were driving out of town, there was a huge fireworks display over the downtown area. Thanks, Nashville!

And then it was back to Cave City for beer in our wigwams!

kentucky road trip

Bourbon and horses and dinosaurs, oh my! Two couples, five days, 1725 miles to Kentucky and back...

So, why did we do this? The plan was hatched in late August over drinks with our friend Jonathan and his girlfriend. At the end of the summer, Jonathan got exciting news from Maker's Mark Distillery: his barrel of bourbon was ready! The marketing geniuses at the historic Kentucky distillery came up with an ambassador program and when you sign up, your name is put on a barrel of bourbon. The bourbon ages for seven(ish) years, and when it's ready you receive an invitation to come to Loretto, Kentucky to tour the distillery and buy two bottles of bourbon from "your" barrel, which you get to label and dip in wax yourself. Genius, right? And we were totally game.

Our itinerary also included two nights in Cave City so we could visit Mammoth Cave National Park, a drive north along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail, and two more nights in Louisville. Unfortunately, our trip was during the federal government shutdown, so the park was closed (lame!), but we found other activities to keep us occupied.

Wop wop.

A summary of our trip, in bullets and photos:

+ We slept in wigwams! Ok, they weren't actually wigwams, they were teepees. Ok, they weren't actually teepees either, since they were made of concrete. But at $55 a night, and with an awesome neon sign out front, Wigwam Village #2 in Cave City was a piece of roadside Americana that was too good to pass up. Plus, I love unique hotels and sleeping in a teepee was on my Life List. This might have been a cheat, especially since the interior looked (and smelled) like dated 70's hotel room, but close enough. (Next up? Sleeping in a treehouse!)

+ We were frustrated to learn that the majority of Kentucky is dry. Dry as in YOU CAN'T BUY ALCOHOL THERE. What the wha? How can more than half the counties in the bourbon state be dry? (Or moist - which means the county is dry except for one city.) Let me just say that when you are staying in a $55 a night concrete wigwam-teepee, you need some freakin' beer. Solution: a 50 mile round trip drive to a liquor store in Bowling Green.

+ We went to Dinosaur World. Enormous, fake, garish, fiberglass dinosaurs - awesome! Also, I'm going to go ahead and cross "Visit Dinosaur Land" (in Virginia) off my list of local things to do, because I really only need to see one depressing theme park filled with enormous, fake, garish, fiberglass dinosaurs in this lifetime.

+ We toured a privately operated cave called Diamond Caverns since the national park was closed. I'm sure it was almost the same except...less mammoth...

+ We took a completely spontaneous trip to Nashville. (More on this later.)

+ The highlight of the trip: touring Maker's Mark Distillery and campus. We observed the many processes involved in manufacturing and aging bourbon from the fermented corn mash stage (it smells like bread baking!), to the rickhouses full of aging bourbon barrels, to the bottling plant where the bottles are labeled and dipped in their signature red wax. At the end of the tour we got to taste the bourbons and my teeth felt like they were on fire. Afterwards, Jonathan AKA "Mr. Ambassador" got to put the labels on his bottles (which were custom printed with his name on them) and got suited up in protective gear to dip them in hot wax. You can read Jonathan's account of the experience on his blog.

+ We stayed in the historic Brown Hotel in Louisville. We tasted their famed Hot Brown Sandwiches (overrated), and drank way too many Bourbon & Gingers (delicious) and Mint Juleps (surprisingly tasty) at the hotel bar. My teeth stopped burning and I actually started...liking...bourbon. (Uh oh.)

+ We visited the Kentucky Derby Museum and toured Churchill Downs. Larry and I found our namesake ponies - Street Shoes Larry and Rachel Alexandra. Morbid trivia from the tour: only the heads, hooves, and hearts of racehorses are buried.

+ We walked over the Clark Memorial Bridge and across the Ohio River into Indiana. We weren't so impressed with the town of Jeffersonville, but we sat outside and had a couple of drinks there while looking back across the river towards Louisville, so I'm totally counting it as visiting another new state.

+ We ate a lot of fast food on the road and dined at several fantastic restaurants in the cool NuLu neighborhood in Louisville: Delicious pizza at a cool gas-station-turned-restaurant called the Garage Bar and an amazing Sunday dinner at Rye, where the four of us managed to order and devour almost everything on the menu.