Last weekend, Eric, Anya, and I decided to do a short weekend trip to Louisville. Originally there was a Music Therapy Skills Training workshop I wanted to attend early Saturday morning, so we decided to make a weekend of it once I was able to get out of playing at church on Sunday morning. Right after we got everything worked out to go, my Skills Training workshop was cancelled, but we decided to just go anyway.
We left Saturday morning and had planned to eat lunch at either Joe Huber's Restaurant or at Huber Winery and Orchard. However, when we arrive to Joe Huber's Restaurant, they were only serving a family style lunch in the dining room for $17.99 a person! No, thank you. So we drove down the road to find that the grill at Huber Winery and Orchard only offered things like $7 cheeseburgers. We were quite disappointed. We ended up buying some homemade wheat bread, peanut butter spread, and chive and onion cheese to have for lunch. It wasn't necessarily cheap but was at least something a little different.
After lunch, we walked around Huber Winery and Orchard. There, you can only taste 4 wines for free and we didn't like any of them. The regular wine tasting was $10 a person and with that you could still only pick 8 wines to try, but you got to keep your glass, which we didn't care about. So we opted not to do the wine tasting. Instead, we walked through the market and got some different kinds of squash and also some gourds for decoration. Eric and I had been to Huber several years ago and we were definitely not impressed with it then, and I can say that it hasn't changed for us. Every other winery we have ever been to in Indiana and Michigan, you can taste wines for free, so it feels kind of like a rip-off to pay $10 to taste wines. Plus, it seemed like everything was overpriced, which made us feel like we were being nickel and dimed with anything we tried to do.
Next, we went to Joe Huber's, hoping it would be better. They had a barnyard that was supposed to have lots of animals and games for kids. It was advertised at $4 per child, parents were free, and children 1 and under were free. Looking at this kind of advertisement would make one think that Anya would be free, seeing that she falls under that "1 and under" category. But when we got to the ticket booth, the lady asked if she was exactly 12 months, which is kind of a stupid question. Unless you go on a child's birthday, who is ever "exactly" 12 months. We told her that Anya was 15 months, but that she was also 1 year old. The lady said she would let us in without paying but really we should have had to pay $4, which kind of made us mad.
Once we got into the barnyard, the only thing Anya could really do was watch goats and feed them corn, though you weren't allowed to let them eat it out of your hand. You couldn't really touch them, and the pig that was advertised was nowhere to be found. They had lots of games for older kids, but they weren't things that Anya could really do. There were a few other things you could do for a little extra money, but seeing as how nothing advertised had been correct so far, we had no reason to believe those things would be worth the money. So we ended up leaving a little early and heading for the hotel.
We stayed at a Hyatt Place and if you have never been to one, we highly recommend them. You feel like you're staying in a really upscale hotel, but they are really cheap. In fact, they are cheaper than most Holiday Inns, Comfort Inns, Sleep Inns, or any other lower-priced hotel. I think we paid $80 for our night at Hyatt Place. With that price, we got free internet and free breakfast and the room was in a suite-style set up, so we had a sleeping area and a sitting area, along with a mini-refrigerator, kitchen sink, and coffee maker.
We ate dinner at Carrabas, which we had never been to. We were starving since we hadn't really had much lunch, and this place did not disappoint. After dinner, we went to one of the malls and did a little shopping. I ended up getting a pair of jeans on sale, and I was super excited that they were a size 5. I don't remember EVER owning a pair of pants that were a size 5!
Once we got back to the hotel room, we put Anya to bed and we watched a little TV and read our books. Anya had not been sleeping well, so we were hoping not to wake her up, but of course, when we were ready to go to bed, her little eyes opened and we had to take her for a drive to get her to go back to sleep. We have since done better with this, but we were still having trouble at that point. We had also decided that we were going to try some different techniques once we got home, but we didn't feel very comfortable letting her cry in a hotel room when other people might be trying to sleep.
I will post about the next day when I get a chance!
