This past weekend, Chris and I were in Lexington, Kentucky for a friend’s wedding. We drove down on Thursday night, late and other than the thrill of buying gas for less than $2.00 a gallon, had an uneventful 7 hour drive. It was dark, there was nothing to see. Oh, except this church about half-way between Dayton and Cincinnati. It was late. It was dark. It was round about 1:30 in the morning and we are zipping along at 70mph (stupid speed limit is 65 in Ohio and there were cops everywhere).
And suddenly, rising up from the waters, quite literally:
The King of Kings Statue is 62 feet high and weighs about 16,000 pounds. Its in front of the Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio. Despite the church name, the statue is made of styrofoam and wood over a steel structure then topped with a resin coating.
I didn’t take this picture, I found it at the Solid Rock Church website. For more photos via Google, click here.
We finally got to the hotel about 3 AM. The hotel was labeled with smoke-free signs all over the place but as soon as we walked in to our room, we knew this had to be a recent development. The smell of smoke was still in the furniture and carpet. Back in 2003, Lexington passed a smoke-free law prohibiting smoking indoors at most businesses and in the common areas of hotels/motels. I don’t know if this hotel was going all-in due to corporate policy or perhaps the government made some changes to the law. Either way, I was both chagrined to realize that KENTUCKY, the center of tobacco country has a smoke-free law while MIchigan does not and less than thrilled about the smell in our room. But we were too exhausted to do anything about it that night.
We slept in Friday morning despite some kind of construction project going on above us (or mayybe next to us). We ended up going out for lunch and found an awesome bookstore which I will talk about shortly. We then picked up the wedding present, sort of. It wasn’t in stock at that location so we got a little card instead. Some friends of ours got in to town (from Memphis) about 5:30 and we visited them in their room down the hall. And discovered what all the noise was earlier in the morning. Seems the hotel was steam-cleaning all the carpets, room by room. Our friends’ room had been done that morning and there was a note on the door about the wet carpet. Not mentioned: the damp couch and chairs in the room. You really couldn’t sit on anything except the bed and your socks got soggy if you walked around without shoes. They complained and were told there were no other rooms as the hotel was booked (many of the guest were our fellow wedding attendees).
They decided to take a nap and we went back to our thankfully dry room while I did some homework and Chris watched TV (and vice versa). We watched ….Later, we met up with our friends and went to a place called Harry’s to await the arrival of the wedding rehearsal crew. We had some sushi at Harry’s, which I will also talk about later. (This post isn’t about the food we ate, if you hadn’t figured that out yet.) We socialized and had a few drinks but the wedding was at 1pm the next day so no late night. The next morning, Chris was checking out the contintental breakfast in the hotel while I was getting dressed. We needed to run over to Target for a card to put the “look what we bought but they didn’t have” card in. And a black belt, not brown. This was to be a quick trip as we needed to get back and get all gussied up for the ceremony. -Knock on the door- its the carpet cleaner guy. He wants to come in an clean our carpets, while we are there! I said no. He said they are doing all the rooms. I said we are not having the carpet cleaned while we are guests. I do not want wet carpet and chairs; we will be in and out today between wedding related events. This is not acceptable. It took a few minutes but in the end the guy was okay with that but I was just stunned that management would even allow this! So, before we went to Target, I tried to with the desk clerk. He was a jerk and actually walked away from me in the middle of a sentence. And claimed he didn’t know anything about it! Really, you are in charge today and you don’t anything about 2 guys in a truck with 100 feet of hose snaking through the building, entering people’s rooms? I was and am still a little pissed about it. I’m writing a letter to the hotel management (big corporation). I’ve stayed with this company before and never had such a problem. The desk clerk’s rudeness was only magnified by the fact that everyone else was so friendly. I think I heard “come back and visit us again soon” 20 times over the weekend.
Later on, when we were leaving the hotel for the actual wedding ceremony, there was a guy painting the front door trim. Why this place picks a high-traffic time to perform such maintenance is truly beyond my comprehension.
My rant is over, I’ll get down to the business of writing about the food now….
Good Food Hunting 