Our 24 Hour Vacation...

When your life revolves around timing to visit Papa each day, you learn to adapt. We did that the beginning of July. We will be married 50 years in 2020. We don't want one of those big parties at all, either of us. What we want is to get our kids and grandmonsters together for one weekend. We are visiting places we might do this to see where we want to hold this family weekend. We wanted to check out Great Wolf Lodge outside of Cincinnati. To that end, I spent Tuesday morning, July 2nd with Papa. I hurried home and we loaded the Jeep and were off on our 24 hours vacation. 

Our first stop was Great Wolf Lodge. 

We explained what we were looking to do and they showed us the kinds of rooms they have and what they offered at the counter. We pulled out our list of rooms we would need and tried to find the right combination for our family if everyone is able to come. We reserved these rooms just in case this is where we go. Then we were encouraged to walk around the facility and see what we thought. Here are pictures of some of the things to do on the inside of the facility.

We then drove to our hotel to see if we could check in. We could and we did. 

When in our room I began the search for a place for dinner that might be a little unique to the area. I found a place named Two Cities Pizza. It was obviously in an old building. Sounded like a plan. We climbed back in the Jeep and went to dinner.

Turns out the old building that houses Two Cities Pizza was the original City Hall for Mason, Ohio. Two young men who were friends from their childhood always wanted to have a business together. They each grew up and went to college to study different things. Then they decided to find the right place and start that business dream. Two Cities Pizza was born. It is called Two Cities Pizza because they serve Chicago style and New York style pizza. We each ordered well and the food was excellent. We did not have the pizza!! Our server was talking to us and we mentioned that we were from Sadieville, Kentucky and it was just north of Georgetown. Turns out she is a horse aficionado and comes to the Kentucky Horse Park regularly. When she does, she stays in Georgetown! It is a very tiny world folks. We were extremely pleased with our choice for dinner. If we have a family gathering at Great Wolf Lodge, we will plan a family dinner at Two Cities Pizza. 

We all know that calories and fat grams do not exist when you are on vacation. Even if that vacation is only 24 hours long. So an ice cream run was in order after dinner. Claude spotted a Dairy Queen near our hotel so we drove back to it. Imagine our delight when we found this wall of fun to enjoy as we ate our blizzards.

We found everything on the list in this hand painted mural about the area. Great Wolf Lodge and Kings Island are in the background. It was fun and Claude had a good eye for finding these things. Now time for some rest.

Wednesday morning we had breakfast in the hotel's breakfast buffet. Then we were off for Jungle Jim's. Andie, our daughter, suggested this stop. Turns out there are two of them in Cincinnati and one of them was at an exit off I-275 on our way home. 

Okay, this place is just fun. Again it has an interesting back story. There is a video of how it all came to be which you can watch when you go into the store. A guy started all this with a fresh vegetable stand. Now he has these two enormous stores with all kinds of treasures in them. It is like a grocery store on steroids. We roamed through the International market and found so many things. I checked the aisle that had things from South Africa as that will be our big trip this year. Very tiny section on a very tiny shelf. Makes me wonder what our dining will be like in Kruger National Park. Hmmmm.... We found an entire shelf display under a firetruck of bacon flavored things!! Claude spent a good deal of time roaming through a whole corner of the store filled with aisles of sauces and rubs for the king of BBQ and smoking. Then he came to me with a big grin and I got this fun picture of my guy. He found a sauce named Claude for smoking brisket. Yes, we purchased it!! The other thing we poured over was an entire wall of soda pop in very interesting flavors. You can get a cardboard carrier and make your own 6 or 8 pack of different kinds of soda. We did this and plan to share it with the Marx family while Bonnie is here. The other section that was of great interest of us was the cheese section. We came prepared with a cooler and put all the cheese we bought in it. Yes, we know how to do these things. 

After shopping at Jungle Jim's were found a Jimmy John's for lunch and purchased a large cup of ice to set in the cooler with our cheeses. 

We pointed the Jeep for Sadieville and got home in time for me to spend the afternoon visiting Papa.

And that, my friends, is how one has a 24 hour vacation!!