I was going through the pictures on my phone and realized I had a bunch from our trip to Delaware, Columbus, Toledo and Valparaiso. Yeah, this is the same trip where we encountered the creepy clown in the bar. I’ll think you’ll get a kick out of at least a few of these. Let’s jump in shall we?Our buddy Heather took us to Eddie George Grille 27 (the added “e” makes it fancy, just ignore the 70 TVs playing sports, some of which aren’t even in season right now) in Columbus after our reunion shenanigans. They ordered deep fried cheeseburgers (the missus snapped a picture of hers with my phone at my request) while I got a deep fried Italian sandwich. Mine was awesome and so were the burgers. While visiting my parents in Toledo, the four of us all went to a Toledo Mudhens game (that’s the minor league team that feeds into the Detroit Tigers). I got the tickets for my dad for his birthday and the seats turned out to be pretty awesome. Also, the beer was cheap. And, to answer your inevitable question, no, I don’t know what a mudhen is.
The great thing about the new(ish) Mudhens stadium is that it looks like it was just dropped in the middle of downtown Toledo. You can see how there’s buildings all around it. Some of those are hotels and apartment buildings, so you can just hang out and watch a game from there. Of course, that also means you can get hit by a ball if you’re just walking down the sidewalk. I was disappointed to find that Tony Packos hot dogs were not served in the stadium, though there is a restaurant across the street. This is how close we sat to the bullpen, by the way.The next day we left for Indiana for my buddy Geof’s marriage to the lovely Eileen with my folks driving (they were also invited, though they probably would have driven us and gone back home if we asked cause they’re awesome). Just outside of Valparaiso we stopped at a rest stopped that a carload of my friends from Toledo also happened to stop at. It was all very serendipitous. Anyway, there was a little gift shop that had a ton of statues like the dragon and fairy here. I contemplated buying one as a wedding present, but the missus reminded me we already had a gift and I’m not that generous. And finally, the day after the wedding we had a crazy-early flight out of Midway in Chicago that my parents were nice enough to drive us to. While walking through this strange new place, I was delighted to see them celebrating Chicago’s two finest sons Jake and Elwood Blues. There were actually two statues, but with the sun coming in through those huge windows, this was the best I could get. The other photo was completely washed out. There you have it. It was a great trip filled with friends, family and fun, plus we didn’t have to drive out, so you can’t really go wrong with that!