For those of you who were already in the know about our plans to surprise Gary yesterday, we pulled it off! For those of you who weren’t, we were part of an elaborate plot to surprise Gary, a close friend of our family who we haven’t seen for a while. He had no idea, and it was awesome, but I’ll get to that in a minute!
Yeah, I really did wake Mike up yesterday by deflating the air mattress. I’m the worst person ever. In my defense, this was after weeks (weeks!) of him telling me to wake him up in the mornings because he likes getting on the road early….yeah, right! Every morning that I tried, he would just roll over and go back to sleep (and then say to me at nine thirty, ‘Why didn’t you wake me up sooner?’) So yeah. I deflated the air mattress…after trying unsuccessfully to wake him up a few times. And it worked! And he was pretty upset about it. It was pretty funny. (What? I already admitted that I’m a terrible person!!)
Anyway, yesterday we were supposed to arrive in Columbus in the afternoon to set Gary up so that my parents and a group of their friends could show up and be at his favorite bar waiting when we got there. Well, apparently he was a little excited about taking us to the bar, and there was a concern that we wouldn’t be able to keep him at the house long enough if we got there too early, so we were told to arrive a little late, just to be safe. Well, the way things go on this road trip of ours, being late is rarely a challenge, and yesterday was no exception to that rule!
We went to the Wild Egg in Louisville for breakfast, and it was pretty good. Not the best breakfast we’ve ever had, but it did the trick. Since Mike was still a bit upset about the air mattress, I sat quietly and wrote my email while we waited for our food to arrive (that’s why it was late – that and the fact that I didn’t really plan the air mattress thing and I hadn’t written it before I pulled the plug. Once Mike was up, I couldn’t say ‘Oh wait, we can’t leave! I haven’t written my email yet!’)
Email sent, and breakfast finished, we headed for downtown Louisville to see the Louisville Slugger museum. I knew there was a giant bat out front, and you all know how I love to get my picture taken with that sort of thing. The thing we didn’t realize ahead of time was that you can peek through the windows and watch them making the bats! It’s awesome! You could walk along the sidewalk and watch every step of the process. It’s a shame we only put 8 minutes on the meter – I could have watched that for hours!
Picture taken, we headed to Churchill Downs to see if we could get a picture in front of it as well… That part of our day didn’t work out so well. There was a race or something going on, so all the lots were manned by people asking for money to park, and we decided that it didn’t look all that impressive anyway, so we just drove around it and headed on our merry way. We were discussing taking the scenic route to Cincinnati and wandering around there before heading to Columbus when Mike had the thought to map the route to Gary’s to see how much time we needed to get there. Google said four hours! Oops! It was already 12:30! A little late is one thing, but we should probably be there by the time the plane lands! So, we hit the interstate and Mike pulled his speed demon hat out of his back pocket and we were off! (Don’t worry Mom, we were very safe!)
We arrived at Gary’s with a little time to spare, so we sat in the backyard chatting for a while before his neighbors (the Garmans, who were absolutely in on the surprise) arrived and suggested we head over to the bar. Of course, I had been texting my mom, and she was supposed to tell me when it was okay for us to head over. I hadn’t heard from her so I stalled as best I could – hiding in the bathroom and then ‘forgetting’ my bag inside. Fortunately, I got the go ahead text just when I ran out of excuses for not getting in the car.
When we arrived at the bar, they were all there (at reserved tables even though Flanagans normally doesn’t do that!) and Gary was shocked! It was awesome. We hung out and talked and laughed and drank and ate and just had fun together. It was amazing to see everyone, and I think I can speak for all of us in saying that seeing Gary surprised and happy was absolutely worth all the plotting and planning and flying across the country (or driving to Kentucky to kill time in our case). The only bummer is that Gary’s wife Nancy isn’t here with us. She would have loved this! (Nancy passed away recently, and we all miss her terribly. She was an amazing, amazing lady.)
Now, the excuse for all this is that Dave (yes, the one and only Dr. Dave) is getting married in a few weeks (I think 29 days to be exact!) and he decided to have his bachelor party in Columbus and to surprise Gary, which is pretty awesome of him if you think about it. So, for the next few days Mike gets to hang out with the dudes and bachelor party it up and I will get to hang out with my mom and her friend Jean (we might be allowed to hang out with the boys a little bit.) It’s going to be fun! Of course, the whole ‘what happens in Columbus, stays in Columbus’ thing might put a damper on my daily updates, but it’s not like any of them will read them (until they get back home) so I’ll see if I can’t get away with telling about a few of the best things that happen.