We went on a trip to Kentucky for a wedding.  Click below to read the details.

Last week I went to Charlotte for a week for MQ training with Greg and David from work.  The class was kinda dry, but the week was good. We had some good food and gained some valuable information for work.  Some notable meals were Bravo! Italian Cucina, a Caribbean joint, and Boardwalk Billy's.  My favorite was Boardwalk Billy's, where I ate my weight in crustaceans. Greg and I went to the local Peak Fitness every night to work out.  That place was packed.  The first day, we tried going right after class, but there were so many people in there, it was impossible to get anything done.  Half of the guys in the gym were just there to check out the women, but it still made getting around difficult.  Because of that situation, we ended up going every night at 8:00 pm or later and doing a weight lifting workout plus a 30 minute cardio session on the elliptical, or as an auctioneer here in town once called it, the "epilepsy machine." That schedule put us back at the hotel at 11:00 every night, so there wasn't much going on besides class, working out, and sleep.  I was dog-tired by the end of the week.

So Friday, I drove back from Charlotte - through construction traffic and rain - to my house where Steph was waiting with Greg's Miata to go to Kentucky.  I took about 30 minutes to grab some stuff for the trip and we were off again.  The Miata is a tiny little car and I am a 6'2" man.  This made for an interesting 8 -hour drive.  With the top down, it probably would have been really cool, but it rained ALL THE WAY.  Steph drove like a mad woman all night through the rain and we made it through West Virginia and almost to the  Kentucky border by 11:00pm or so.  We hopped off of the interstate in  Huntington, WV to look for a hotel.  I wanted tyo find a Marriott hotel so I could earn points in their rewards program, so we drove around for awhile looking for anything that qualified.  We quickly realized that this was the town from the movie We Are Marshall.  It wasn't too difficult to piece together the subtle clues like 40 foot, lighted signs that read WE ARE MARSHALL, signs in every bar window that said WE ARE MARSHALL, and the other various WE ARE MARSHALL paraphernalia around the town.  What we did not see was a Marriott hotel, so we decided to head across the border into Kentucky and check Ashland, where I knew there was a Fairfield Inn.

By the time we pulled into Ashland, we were pretty tired, so we were pleased when an eighteen-wheeler ran a red light at an intersection and almost killed both of us.  I have a feeling the Miata would not have fared well against it.  Wide awake, we were rejuvinated enought to drive around for an hour listening to hotleirs tell us they were 100% booked.  After an hour, I pulled out the laptop and used Microsoft Streets and Trips to look up hotels in the area and we started calling them all.  We finally found an available room at the Days Inn and raced over there to grab it before someone else could. It was old, dated, and heavenly.  We both slept like rocks and woke up refreshed enough for another day of driving. Most of the day's trip was uneventful, but we did stop for some genuine Kentucky Fried Chicken somewhere in Kentucky.  We pulled up to the building and saw people inside inflating balloons and laying out cake, cookies, a punchbowl, and streamers.  I started laughing and wondered aloud who the hell would have their brithday party at KFC?  I wrote it off as an affectation of people in Kentucky and we headed in.  It turns out it was customer appreciation day at this particular KFC, so we were treated to smiles and balloons and our meals were followed up with sickly-sweet cake covered in too-much frosting.  Good stuff.

The Kentucky countryside was aggressively bland.  It's like West Virginia without the mountains, which is the same as saying West Virginia without the pretty.  If you take the makeup off of that state, what you get is not what you thought you had.  Fugly is the word.  Things brightened up around Lexington, KY, which is apparently the Horse capitol of the world.  I believe it.  There was nothing but mile after mile of horse farm surrounding the hightway.  I can't even imagine what the rest of the city looks like if that is just the land surrounding the stretch of road we were on.  I started wondering what kind of city Louisville was and had visions of wooden shacks and rock farmers.  Luckily, a short 20 minutes later, we pulled into Louisville and it was quite a surprise.  First of all, there were bridges everywhere linking Kentucky to Indiana across the Ohio river.  Maybe my memory is foggy, but it seemed like there were an excessive amount of bridges all concentrated in one place, but it was cool looking.  It was a real city with skyscrapers and nice hotels and art museums.  It was surprising ly modern pretty.  As we drove in circles around the hotel we were trying to get to, we noticed that there was a lot of art incorporated into the city's architecture; little things like street signs with wrought iron modern art framing the street name.

We finally pulled into the parking after about three laps around thebuilding and were able to park right up front is a 3/4 sized parking spot.  This was at about 3:00.  We had plenty of time to make the 6:00 pm wedding.  We got checked in, went up to the room, and discovered that Steph had forgotten her dress.  Back to the car we went and raced to the local mall to find something for her to wear.  Things did not go well at all.  We went to six or seven shops and Steph couldn't find anything that she liked in a price range she was comfortable with. On the way to the Mall, she said she wished there was a Stein Mart there because they were currently carrying exactly what she wanted, but we both assumed it was alocal chain because the commercials were so horrible.  After spending WAY too much time at the mall, we decided to give it up and I was going to go to the wedding by myself.  As we sat at the stop light waiting to turn toward the highway, I spotted a Stein Mart across the street.  We made some illigal turns to get into the parking lot, went in, and found a dress in less than ten minutes.

We raced back to the hotel and got ourselves dressed.  By this time, it was 8:00-ish and we had missed the wedding, so we went straight to the reception, thinking we would be getting there mid-way.  Apparently, Lee's wedding photos took awhile because we were one of the first people at the reception.  We sat down at a table and watched people file in.  As I was looking around the room, I noticed someone I recognized, but I wasn't really sure who it was, so I waited for more people to come and give me a clue.  After awhile, I saw Jamie Lemmond's parents come in and head straight for the stranger.  By that time, I had figured out it was Tim Nall and his wife Carol, so I went over and intoriduced myself.  Then Jamie Lemmond, Chris Jones, and Mark Johnson came in.  It wasn't long before they laid out their plan to terrorize Lee at his wedding.  Apparently, this was traditional among their crew.  I hadn't been to the other guys' weddings, but they told me the pranks that had been played at each one and now it was Lee's turn.  Their plan was to attack him with silly string as he left the wedding.  After covering him with it, they would ask Lee's dad to take a picture of it to distract Lee.  At this point, Jamie was to sneak up behind Lee with a Jack-o-Lantern filled with the guts of two carved-out pumpkins and put it on Lee's head.  Nasty stuff.

The reception went on for awhile and we talked and reminisced for awhile.  We also took some time out to recon the building and solidify the attack plan.  At some point we got lost in the building and were planning our attack in a part of the building that no one was going to be in,.  After figuring out the details in the correct part of the building, we hung out until it was time for the bride and groom to leave.  Of course, they decided to leave in a different area than we had planned, so we made some quick changes to the plan to accomodate.  As Lee and his new wife left the building, Chris Jones pulled Sherry to safety and we attacked.  Mark's first shot hit him in the eye and Lee later siad he thought he was being maced.  Lee was completely covered in silly string within a minute. It was rather impressive.  As we held Lee still for his picture, Jamie snuck up behind with the pumpkin and dropped it down on Lee's head, almost breaking his nose.  The pumpkin guts mostly spilled to the ground en route to Lee's head, which was fortunate for him.  After Lee left, we chatted for awhile longer and everybody headed back to their hotels to get some rest before the journey home.  Steph and I went back to the Galt House, ordered a pizza at 1:00am, and then went to sleep.

We checked out the next morning and took a nice, ten hour Sunday drive back to Winston-Salem.  The trip back was uneventful.  We took our time, stopped when we felt like it, and generally enjoyed the drive.  It was cold as hell, though, so we didn't get out of the car too much.  All in all, it was a good weekend.