Sister Trip

My big sister Becki came out for a visit over Labor Day weekend. We drove down to a little town in Southern Illinois called Vienna, but pronounced Vyenna. It was a very small, kinda redneckish town. When we pulled up to our hotel, we were scared! The "lobby" smelled so nasty (stale cigarette smoke) that we asked to see our room first before we paid. The girls said ok, but I could tell she was laughing on the inside. You see, there was only one other hotel in town and this was the nicer one.
Well, our room was alright, we just had to hold our breath to run up the stairs because it was like 40 years of trapped cigarette smoke in the stairwell. That's right, no elevator. Oh well.
So the first night there we drove around to find a restaurant and picked the one that had the most cars in the parking lot figuring that it must be the best around. It was called Jimmy's Char House.....Think Hometown buffet or Chuckaramma........except a whole lot worse!!! There was a lot of breaded deep fried food. I didn't recognize most of it, but I'm pretty sure there were fried frog legs in there. I had mashed potatoes and gravy and I'm pretty sure they were from a can.

Well, you may be wondering why we chose to go to Vienna Illinois in the first place. Well our cousin (actually our cousins son, so that must make him a first cousin once removed or a second cousin or something) was getting married and we hadn't seen that side of our family for many moons so we went. I'm so glad we did! It was so good to catch up with them and spend a couple of days together!

We all went on a beautiful hike to a waterfall where we watched a pore little frog in a pond get attacked by a small fish. The frog lost. I'm still a little creeped out by that. It rained on us on the way back. We also went to a town called Metropolis where we went to the Superman museum. Very cool. Then we went to lunch at an interesting little place that listed about 22 different deep fried catfish dishes. I had a hamburger.

It may not have been a luxury vacation but I had so much fun with my sister and cousins and I would do it again in a heart beat!