Early in the week of the 4th I was at work thinking how I needed a break. From work, from everything. And of course, my scheduled vacation from work isn't for another 4 weeks. As I was dealing with a very sick patient it occured to me that I couldn't wait another 4 weeks! I was testing the limits of my insanity.
I did some research online, trying to find a little getaway that both JM and I would enjoy. I came up with doing the
Indiana Uplands Wine Trail (which was mainly for me) and staying the night at the
French Lick Casino Resort (mainly for JM).
We left Friday late morning after JM got off work and headed down to
Huber Winery and Orchard. My original plan had been to taste wine here AND pick our own blueberries and peaches. We were so impressed by this place. Orchards as far as you could see, a winery, restaurant, huge Farmers Market, and even their own store where they made their own cheese AND ice cream! Needless to say, we never made it to picking our own fruit. We tasted a few of their wines...this summer they even had a peach wine that they made from the peach harvest. It was great by itself, but they had also made peach sangria (made from the wine, brandy and peach nectar) which was amazing! After tasting (and buying) a lot of wine, we walked around and did our own little tour. We spent so much time there we had to hurry off to make it to the rest of the wineries!
Our next stop was
Turtle Run Winery. Obviously, I liked this winery because of all the turtle stuff! We made ourselves only buy 2 bottles there since we had gotten a bit carried away at Huber. Here we also learned about
Best Wineries, which I had seen at the Vintage Wine Festival but they weren't online for the trail yet. We decided to stop by there...it wasn't too far, plus, we needed to visit all the wineries to get our gift!
So, we headed off to Best and enjoyed ourselves there. It was also set off in the countryside. They're relatively new so they only had a page of wines, but what they had was very good.
We didn't stay too long at Best as it was getting late in the day and we still needed to stop at
Winzerwald Wineries. This is one that doesn't sell their wine many places outside of the winery and we LOVE their wine, so we wanted to make sure we got there with plenty of time. This was also the only place we took a picture on our whole trip. But, I think the picture sums it up quite well :-)
We were somewhat surprised, this is a very small building and it's kind of a pain to get to. But their wine makes it totally worth it!!!
Then we headed up to
French Lick Winery. We lucked out, not only was it across the street from the Resort but it was also open till 9! I had drank A LOT of their cherry wine at a friend of mine's wedding last fall so I was interested to see if it was really as good as I thought it was! I was pleasantly surprised...it was even better!
After tasting and buying (kind of the theme of the day!) we headed back to the resort and got checked in. We had reserved the cheap last minute room and it came with an amazing view of the air conditioner units :-) No, really, it was a fine room. The resort was interesting because it's so old yet the upkeep is great. We went to the pool party they were having for the resort and napped by the pool. Then we had dinner at their steakhouse (bad bad experience, but I won't get into that), then headed over to the casino. JM played a bit of craps and I sat my butt in front of the fisher slot machine and fed it money!
Saturday morning we won all our money back at the breakfast buffet and then headed back home. It was rainy and dreary, so we decided to leave the last 3 wineries for another time. They're all in the Brown County/Bloomington area which isn't that far away from us. We did stop at
Carousel, though. Like Winzerwald, this winery doesn't sell their wines many other (if any) places other than the winery itself. It's another small winery but I absolutely love their wines and the people who run it. Somehow we bought another 6 bottles there...oops! We already had an overflow at home (about 48 bottles) and yet we bought another 22. We probably need to have a party!
After Carousel we headed home. Stopped at Lowe's and bought the much anticipated and awaited
grill. We had a little cookout on Sunday to try it out and I'm in heaven!
We even had some more neighbors come over and introduce themselves on Sunday morning. They had even made oreo truffles to welcome us to the neighborhood! Adorable! All of the neighbors have been so nice and stop by all the time...we couldn't be happier!
