Travel Thursday: Maddening Times in Madison

 

This week I sat down to read our scrapbook from our 6^th annual birthday trip (back in 2018) to Madison, Indiana. It was delightful to read this book! I felt like I finally found my storytelling stride in the land of scrapbooking! I had forgotten so many of the “are you kidding me??” stories and it was a lot of fun to revisit that trip.

                I had just turned 40 when we took this trip, and I’d so been looking forward to visiting this sweet little riverfront town on the Ohio River. I’d heard it was a great place to visit – and it was! But oh, how many mishaps we encountered on this trip!

Because this is such a touristy town, it’s not cheap to stay there. We hadn’t yet discovered Airbnbs (though we made their acquaintance immediately after this debacle) so we picked a riverfront hotel. Allow me to share the story as I wrote it in the scrapbook:

“The lady behind the desk was super nice and beside her was a gentleman taking swigs from his beer bottle. We later determined he was an actual employee and even on duty at the time. The lady took our info, told us about the continental breakfast the next day and the live music coming up later that night. Then she handed us two tickets and said our first two beers were on the house. Then she handed a real key to another young lady who walked us to our room. Our room was not river view, nor was it even in the same building as the lobby. As we walked with the lady we went by a rough looking couple sitting on the patio furniture outside their door. They were both smoking, directly under a sign that said no smoking, and they were each holding a dog. (We had been asked when we checked in if we had pets, because they’re not allowed.) When the lady opened the door, I wanted to cry. It was decorated nicely, but it was the size of our car and smelled like a wet sock.”

I DID cry when the employee left, but we stayed (no choice, really) and made the best of it.

It rained most of the weekend, so all my photos include humidity-big hair.

Our attempt to find dinner the first night went as follows:

The first restaurant we wanted to try was not just waterfront, but floating IN the water, and it the ramp to get to it had been destroyed by a flood, so it was closed. (Facebook hadn’t been updated in the last three months to reflect that, but it was, in fact, closed.

Next, we tried a pizza place, but there weren’t any places to park, so we figured there also wouldn’t be tables left.

We went to a coffee shop that also served food, only to be told they had stopped serving food for the night because they weren’t very busy.

Our fourth attempt restaurant was a winner, but that wore us out!

The continental breakfast at the hotel was so bad that we never went back after the first day.

The Ohio scenic byway…wasn’t. I’d try it again. Maybe we just had bad weather after a significant flood. But it sure was a fail on this trip.

We hiked in Clifty Falls State Park, which was a great experience and remains one of our favorite parks we’ve hiked in Indiana. But the start of our day was so foggy that the overlooks didn’t yield much! And it had rained so much all spring that our shoes and socks were soaked with water and mud by the time we left.

Never fear, though! The shower pressure was so intense, it just pressure washed the dirt right off!

We elected to walk across the bridge into Kentucky and then come back (a mile total) and a storm hit while we were walking home. (Even though the radar was 100% clear.) Even though we could see our hotel from the bridge, we couldn’t get to it without getting soaked, s we had to hide in a shelter.

Whew! What a trip! We really did have a lot of fun. We drank so much coffee, learned a lot about the history of Madison and some other small towns. We loved hiking the park and wandering through antique shops. But oy…there were some real doozies on this trip!