92 County Tour: Orange County

We decided that since our anniversary destination took us to a yet-unvisited-county, we would make our trip double as a county tour!

French Lick is in Orange County, Indiana, which sadly is not nearly as warm as the Orange County we all know by heart! It's almost directly south of where we live, but it's allllllllll the way at the bottom of the state! Orange County is not actually orange {though there are a lot of trees there that I imagine create a lovely similar hue in the fall!}. It got its name because many of the first people to settle there were Quakers who were fleeing slavery in Orange County, North Carolina.

There aren't any huge, famous cities in Orange county, but it's home to French Lick, with its history of mineral springs, casinos, wineries, and Larry Bird, and also the town of Paoli, which has a ski/tubing resort {that wasn't open yet when we were there}. There's also a lake there, and if we'd gone in the summer, you can know we would have visited that!

Here are some of the highlights of our visit to Orange County!

We toured {but did not stay at} the French Lick Resort. I am not a history buff at all, but I really enjoyed the tour we took. Our guide was great and knew his history well. He told us about the mineral springs in the olden days, and how people came there because they believed the water would heal everything under the sun. He also showed us all the amazing, ornate decorations and how when the Sheraton corporation took over the hotel several years ago, they ripped it all out and made it look like all the other Sheratons. It all had to be restored and redesigned later. I can't even imagine redoing and restoring all this kind of beauty:

 He also showed us these crawl space hallways that were originally used by hotel staff to transport carts of all sorts of hotel needs that they didn't want guests to have to see. Eventually these areas were turned into public halls, because everyone is so fascinated by the stone, and they wanted guests to be able to see it!

We also toured the other big hotel - the West Baden Springs hotel. We decided if we were ever independently wealthy enough to have a night at one of the hotels, this is the one we would pick - because the atrium is AMAZING.

Our same tour guide told us the story of this hotel and the ups and downs of its history throughout the years. He also took us through the gardens and showed us the locations of some of the mineral springs, though they are no longer accessible.

Fascinating stories!

We also visited the little town of Paoli, which has the most adorable courthouse:

They also had this old hotel for sale, and I told Ryan we should buy it and go all Chip and Joanna Gaines..

We shopped around in the little stores on their square, and that was fun, too! :)

Then we went to our coffee date for the county. The one we picked was called French Licks. It specializes in coffee and ice cream. See what they did there with the name???

 The menu - all cute on chalkboards.

 This particular coffee shop also featured a wood carving store, so there were wood carvings everywhere - including one of Larry Bird!

 They also had this huge buffalo, which Ryan wanted to sit on, despite the sign that said DO NOT TOUCH. Ha!

We didn't do any of their specialty drinks - just fresh brew and ice cream, but we enjoyed what we had! And we'd never shared a coffee shop with wood carvings before, so that was unique! {This was also where we played the game of checkers, where Ryan won by a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng shot.

These are the non-Christmas-related highlights of the county; you saw all the rest in our anniversary posts!

Thanks for the fun weekend, Orange County! We enjoyed our visit and hope someday we can come back and enjoy the lake and the skiing. {That last part is just Ryan.}

"Tree Farms" and Other Adventures

Sunday morning, we had to check out of our hotel and come home from our fun anniversary getaway. Sadness.

Our plan for the day was to leave French Lick, drive up to the south side of Indianapolis, visit a Christmas tree farm I'd scoped out online, get our tree for the year, swing by my sister's house to say hi to her, and then come home.

The best laid plans, though, right?

We left French Lick and headed north, past this one quick detour:

Details. :)

And shortly after we left Sonic, it began to rain. We'd read that there was, you know, a 100% chance of rain, but reports can be wrong, right?

Wrong.

It wasn't raining very hard, and there was ANOTHER tree farm on the north side of Indianapolis {that we went to on our first anniversary, actually} so I thought maybe after we stopped and talked to my sister for a while, it would all have evaporated, and we could go to that farm on the way home.

Well, it only started raining harder, so we went for plan B:

And then the day {weather-wise} just went downhill from there, all the way home:

Apparently the weather report actually was wrong, but not in the way I hoped. Rather than being wrong in rain = no rain, it was wrong in that rain = SNOW.

So we came home, unloaded the car, unpacked, and tried to formulate a plan for what we should do about our tree.

Interesting tree farm fact: most are only open on the weekends. I didn't want to wait a whole extra week for a tree. Interesting central Indiana tree farm fact: There aren't many. In our county and several surrounding counties there are absolutely no tree farms. {Guess we should start one!!} So the closest farm open during the week was 45 minutes away. Ryan did have Monday off work, so we considered going that afternoon when it opened, but I told Ryan I couldn't justify driving 45 minutes each way and spending the extra time on the farm to pay more than we could afford for a tree. {I remembered that particular farm was pretty pricey. We got our first live tree there right after our wedding.}

Soooooooooooooooooo...

...NEW TRADITION!!!!

Why, yes! That is a supermarket behind us!

We decided to head to a grocery store and scope out their live trees, lined up against the building, under the protection of an awning.

Now if you even THINK for one minute that sacrificing a trip to a real tree farm for our tree meant we were going to sacrifice a photo shoot, you have another thing coming. I don't care if I am at the grocery store. We are making memories here, people, and I am taking pictures.

Apparently some shoppers gave me some strange looks. Guess who does not even care? ME!

 Some trees were out where you could see them and some were bound up in netting. And another fun fact about buying trees at this store was that all trees were the same price, regardless of size. So as I'm sure you can imagine, Ryan decided if we had the pick of the litter, we were getting the biggest tree there. {We have vaulted ceilings in our living area, so we could handle a much bigger tree than we've ever been able to before.}

His choice.

I guarded it while he went inside to pay:

 NO ONE was getting that tree on my watch. Not happening.

And then it was time to load 'er up!

Next week I'll show you the decorating festivities.

But in the meantime, this tree, y'all. It is HUGE. It looks like a nice skinny tree in that netting, but when we unloaded it, that thing is crazy huge. 8 1/2 feet tall, full and wide, and we named it Griswold, for obvious reasons.

Ole' Grizzy is a good fit in our new living room. In our old house, he would have taken up the WHOLE house! Ha!

But what we learned is that while going to a tree farm is fun and exciting, grocery stores are more our budget, and clearly I can make the adventure just as much fun! I think that was the lesson I loved the most out of the whole thing. Traditions are traditions because they are yours, not because they match Pinterest suggestions. We like choosing a live tree and decorating it together. We did that. So we didn't drive a long way and pay twice the price this year. We still made memories and had fun! Win!!!!!

An Extra Day for Fun

Here's the thing about French Lick. It is known for a very specific set of things, and if you are either disinterested in said things, or you go at the wrong time of year for those things, you're kind of out of luck for a long-term visit. And that was what happened to us.

French Lick has some pretty amazing golf courses, we've heard, but we don't golf, and also - it was freezing. It also has a huge casino, but we don't gamble. There are nice wineries, but we don't drink. There is a HUGE indoor water park, but somehow the idea of being surrounded by swarms of kids and probably germs on our anniversary getaway didn't really appeal to us. There's a big ski resort a few miles away, but it doesn't open until mid-December, so we just missed out on that. {Big sigh of relief from me and a big sigh of disappointment from Ryan.} There's also a big lake and some trails nearby, but again - December.

All that to say, our advice to you on planning your own visit to this fair city {when not under the confines of immovable dates like anniversaries} is to pay attention to the time of year you go, and you might get to participate in more than we did!

Even so, we had enough to keep us busy for two days, and part of "keeping busy" included rest, which we both sorely needed.

Saturday morning was a sleep-in-and-take-the-morning-to-be-lazy kind of day. I love that so much about a vacation. That was one of the best parts of our honeymoon, too. We didn't have so many things planned that we couldn't just relax a bunch.

When we finally did get out and about, we drove to the next town over, Paoli, which is the home of the ski resort that wasn't yet open. What was open was a little local BBQ joint, and Ryan does love local BBQ, so we stopped for lunch!

After lunch, we walked around the town square of Paoli, which I'll tell you more about in the county date post. Their town square is actually a roundabout {which I am fundamentally opposed to, but it makes for pretty architecture}.

Then we went back to French Lick in search of a Christmas ornament to commemorate our trip! This was only SLIGHTLY easier to find than the bakery. Walking back through the hotels again, seeing more of their Christmas decor, and checking out the shops was a lot of fun!

And then we went for an afternoon coffee date, and while there, Ryan tried to teach me how to play Checkers. It went like this:

After dark {which, you know, currently happens about 5 pm}, we went back through downtown to get some pictures of the pretty light displays, and we grabbed dinner to go at Subway. We took it back to our hotel and ate while we watched movies!

The next morning, we packed up to come home...but we enjoyed our stay in French Lick!

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. :)