Maybe a little crazy, but we wanted to go visit friends of ours who live outside Louisville, KY and with the current cost of airfare and the requirement to purchase 3 tickets instead of only 2, we decided that it made the most sense to drive. Closer to the actual drive we started to have doubts, but by then it was really too late to fly. So, we decided that driving through the night would be the easiest on Madelyn since hopefully she would sleep for most of it and the two of us could trade off driving.
Sidebar: Originally, we were going to drive halfway early Thursday, take a break in Chicago with Justin's brother and sister-in-law, and then arrive late Thursday/early Friday in Kentucky. However, the more we thought about it, the more we thought that driving straight through would be better and that driving through the night would have the best chance for success. We made the decision to change our plans on Monday (a few days before leaving), and we decided that we should leave Wednesday night, arriving in Kentucky at our friends' house a day earlier than we had initially told them. Our friends graciously accommodated our last minute change of plans.
Justin's family has been known to make last minute changes of plans, or even plans mid travel, so this is pretty much par for the course for the Howard family. Since our friends are not as used to the Howard family ways as we are, we are glad that they still invited us to come back.
We survived our drive to Louisville with only one meltdown in the middle of the night (it did last 2 hours, but out of the 13+ hours we were driving that is a a pretty small percentage of the time). After lunch at a fabulous place called Lynn's Paradise Cafe where Justin, Madelyn, and I experienced our first ever 'Hot Brown" sandwiches, we crashed at our friends' place for the rest of the day and recovered from our drive.
Friday we took the kids to the Louisville Zoo (where our Minnesota Zoo membership got us 1/2 price admission). It was beautiful sunny weather and the kids all had a great time seeing all the animals.
On Saturday our friends got a babysitter for the kids and we went to Keeneland, a horse race track in Lexington. The big race of the day was the Bluegrass Stakes (with a $750, 000 purse to the winning horse) and is known as one of the lead up races for the Kentucky Derby. It was all the more exciting because we had a horse to cheer for, Scatman. The trainer for that horse is the father of a friend of our friends, so we practically knew the horse :) Although we cheered, things did not come out well for Scatman, who finished near the bottom. The winner of the race, Dullahan, will be running in the Derby this weekend. He's not a favorite, but you never know. The horse that came in second was Hansen, who is also racing in the Derby this weekend. If either of them wins we could say "we saw him race..."
Sunday we kept things much more low key, and we all got in naps before we hit the road in the late afternoon to head home. We made it home a little before 6 am on Monday and even got in a couple of hours of sleep before Madelyn decided it was really time to get up for the day.
We had so much fun we are thinking this is going to have to become an annual event for us. Maybe some year we'll go to the Kentucky Derby, but we aren't ready for that yet!
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