Anniversary #4!

Thought I would give you a peek into the fun we had on our ACTUAL anniversary last Friday! It was nice to not really have a schedule for the day. We could do whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted. We had, I thought, a great mix of just fun and relaxation combined with actual plans.

We had a nice, leisurely breakfast at the hotel, and then we ventured forth to take our annual pictures I showed you a couple of days ago. It stayed just warm enough that we could do the pictures sans coats and hats, but it was definitely a frigid day. We miss our 80 degree wedding day!

French Lick has two HUGE, historic, beautiful hotels that have quite the story and legacy. Even though we couldn't afford to stay in them, we thought it would be fun to tour them. {You do have to pay for the tours, but they're pretty affordable and interesting...and this coming from a girl who really is not a fan of history.}

So in the late morning, we reported for our tour at the French Lick Resort.

I will save some of the details for another post {this trip was a county tour, too, so I'll have a post about that}, but here are a few pictures from the inside that show the beauty of the place all decked out for the holidays!

Santa's corner...he wasn't there that day, but we did see him later in the weekend! 

 They have a huge wall of pictures of famous people {politicians, actors, singers, etc.} who have stayed there, and there was one little hole down in the corner, so someone made himself a distinguished guest.

 The same distinguished guest also joined the carolers.

 Check out the TREE!!! And the LOBBY!!!!!

 This is an ACTUAL gingerbread house, and I stood with it so you could appreciate how huge it is. Can you imagine how much time this took???

Our tour guide was really great. He knew his stuff inside and out and was interesting and engaging, and we really learned a lot from him!

When the tour was over, we were pretty hungry, so we went in search of lunch. You may have heard this story on the podcast, but we found this pizza place we thought we'd try, and we discovered they had a lunch buffet. We arrived 4 minutes before the end of the buffet, so it became the big joke that we showed up for the discounted pizza scraps on our anniversary.

When we finished lunch, we walked around the downtown part of French Lick for a while. To be fair, it's not a very big place, and there aren't a ton of shops, but it's starting to build up, and there were a few cute places to check out, so we did that. Then we went back to the hotel to rest and watch our wedding video.

We had reservations to tour the OTHER big hotel in town in the late afternoon, so we made our way to the West Baden Springs hotel, which was magnificent in a completely different way from the French Lick hotel. We had the same tour guide again, and I should mention that for both tours, we happened to luck out and had private tours. No one else signed up for one when we did!

This ATRIUM!!!! It was astounding. And just for a point of reference: the paintings on the base of the tree are way taller than even tall men. That's how huge that tree was!

Again, the tour was really interesting, and when it ended, we decided to just hang out for a bit in the atrium, listen to the live music, and relax.

I felt a little guilty hanging out in jeans in this fancy hotel, but I felt better once I started seeing a bunch of jammies! There is a train that runs through town and at this time of year, they do Polar Express train rides. So all these families had arrived, and not only were the kids in jammies, but most of the adults were, too!!

That night, we had a special treat: Ryan had arranged for us to take a carriage ride on the grounds of the West Baden Springs hotel. I had never been on one before, and I LOVED it.

The ride was simple and lovely. The carriage was covered and we had a warm blanket, so we didn't get too cold. The funniest part was when Ryan took off his gloves and laid them on my lap {I didn't know it} and then he asked me to move to the other carriage seat so he could take my picture, and in the process of moving, I threw the gloves out of the carriage! WHAT!?!? We were able to recover them, and no the horse didn't do anything on them!

We still hadn't had dinner, and we really weren't hungry, either, so after our romantic carriage ride, we went to a little sports bar/grill for appetizers and dessert. {Ryan felt bad that the only food I'd had on our anniversary was a continental hotel breakfast and pizza buffet scraps!} The place was called 33 Brick Street and had tons of Larry Bird memorabilia, because French Lick is Larry Bird's hometown.

It wasn't busy, and our waitress was AMAZING. She took really good care of us, and even brought out Larry Bird's NBA trophy and his Olympic jacket for Ryan to have photo opps with!

 We searched high and low ALL DAY for a bakery in French Lick so we could get cupcakes for our anniversary dessert. Turns out there ISN'T a bakery there {at least not an advertised one!} so we split a salted caramel cheesecake slice at the restaurant. Our waitress even drew us a smiley face, and if the cheesecake is a nose, it's true to Ryan and Bekah form, that's for SURE!

It really was a great ending to the day, and then we went back to the hotel to exchange cards, read our letters from last year, and write new letters for next year.

Thanks, Ryan, for making our anniversary so wonderful! I had the best time with you, and I'm sorry I threw your gloves out of the carriage. :)