Weekly Roundup: Winter Adventures

 

A weekly round up: eats, workouts, watches, and reads.  I didn't do anything fancy on the food front this week, and there's nothing for workouts/TV/books that's urgent to tell you because they will still be relevant for next week's round up.  So let's skip our normally scheduled programming and I'll tell you the story of how I got out of the house this weekend and went on an adventure. 

P.S. I promised that I'd do an update about the diet thing in early February and it's getting to be early February...look for a separate post about that in a few days.

Operation Get Me Out of the House

Over the past few years, Boy Scouts has gone from being important to pretty much #1 on our family's priority list.  This is going to continue for a few more years, and while it's great for my husband and the boys, the life of a Boy Scout Widow can leave something to be desired.  A summary of how I spent my free time in 2021 is that I sat around the house.  All work and no play was making me a very dull girl, but what was the solution?  I thought about travel, but it's expensive and exhausting.  I don't mind so much if a flight gets delayed and I have to spend the day at an airport when I'm with my family, but things like that are downright no fun when I'm on my own.  Also the goal isn't to spend less time with the fam.  But what if there was a way to go to new places without being away from home for very long?  Aha, there is and it's called local tourism.   Last summer I started making day trips to area attractions and I found that (1) it's the perfect hobby to keep me occupied and (2) hello I thought that I lived in the most boring place on earth and there's hella lot to do here!  The last six months have been incredibly rewarding in ways that I never imagined.

I wound down Operation Get Me Out of the House around Thanksgiving because of holiday stuff, things being closed in winter, and crappy weather.  I figured I'd be hunkered down at home until March with maybe a museum visit here and there.  Then out of nowhere I started hearing about things that are still open this time of year.  Specifically there is a Frank Lloyd Wright house about three hours away that does tours.  That got my attention because I went to a FLW house last year and it was mind blowingly awesome but I'd assumed that it was the only one in my area.  Well, not so fast, I now know that there are FLW buildings that offer public tours in 22 states, which is why I'm mentioning it.  I wanted to go but three hours is a bit of a hike so I needed something else to make it worth the trip.  Facebook's spies were listening, because an ad for a cave tour close by popped up in my feed.  Guess what, I got a taste of Cave Life over the summer so I was interested in seeing more and the nice thing about caves is that they are the same temperature year round.  The FLW tour was at a specific time and the caves tours were every half hour depending on how many people showed up, so it was a good pairing of having to be at one place at a specific time and the other place whenever.

Well wouldn't you know that the weather forecast was clear, we didn't have the boys, and the hubs wanted to stay home and chill.  I was cleared for an adventure day!  Here's how Saturday went down:

7 AM: wheels up with a cup of coffee and breakfast of fruit, string cheese, and a Clif bar for the road.

10 AM: I arrive at my destination as planned.  The FLW tour was at 11 and I had a plan for what to do if I arrived early.  There was a rock garden about 10 minutes away, so it was an easy way to fill in the time.  The nice thing about rock gardens is that they're pretty much the same year round.

11 AM: Tour time!  I didn't and still don't know much about FLW but being in one of his houses is a unique experience and I recommend it if you ever have the opportunity.  The best way that I can describe it is that you is that you get to be inside a work of art - I didn't say that you get to see a work or art, I said you get to be inside of it.

1 PM: tour is done and I'm starving.  I go back and forth on travel food.  Obviously it's cheap, easy, and fast to just bring something from home so that's what I do 99% percent of the time but this was an exception.  Travel reviews of the area were singing the praises of a Ramen restaurant so I hit it up for my first ever Fancy Ramen Dining Experience.  I got a Thai curry and it was so good that obviously I ate every bite.

Verdict: yes it was good but the downside of going to the Hottest Ramen Restaurant in Town is that it took a full hour to get in and out which made a long day even longer.  I think that eating out on the road will continue to be a 1% of the time thing and I'll save it for shorter trips.

2 PM: back on the road, get to the cave just in time for the next tour.  Stalactites and stalagmites and oh my!  Last summer I toured a small cave but this place was huge and may I just say that in the cave world bigger is much better.

4 PM: head home.  That's when it starts to hit that it's been a long day.  Three hours isn't so long on the way out but it always drags on the way back.

7 PM: home!  I grab a snack and an adult beverage and snuggle up next to hubs on the couch.  He's had a low key day with a mix of stuff that he needed to do and stuff that he wanted to do, so we've both had a good day.  

What's Next for Operation Get Me Out of the House

It was nice while it lasted but it looks like the weather is turning bad so I'll probably be at home next weekend.  Once it clears up I've got my eye on a Big City museum spree for three near-ish towns (none of them more than 2 hours away).

Your turn: ever done anything like this?  Ever been to a FLW house?  Or toured a cave?