My sister and I are in Cincinnati this weekend. We drove over on Thursday afternoon and will head home tomorrow. Usually we stay with our cousin Gene and his wife Rita. This weekend they had lots of family plans with a birthday party, flag football game, children coming in from out of town with grandchildren, etc. We looked at coming a different weekend, but it seemed like nothing was going to work out with everyone's schedules. We had selected this weekend because the International Quilt Show is meeting in Cincinnati for the very first time, and Kathy and I are both quilters.
We decided to come this weekend anyway and stay in a hotel. There are no hotels near our aunts or cousins, so we are staying in Florence, KY. It is about a 15 minute drive to downtown Cincinnati from here, but the hotel room was a lot cheaper than staying downtown. The Clarion Inn & Suites is quite nice, and our rooms are large and comfortable. My only complaint is that there is a group of kids here (college? high school?), and they are noisy in the hallway and with slamming doors. But that is not the hotel's fault. Where are the stupid chaperons?
Anyway, our first stop after we checked in Thursday night was Skyline Chili for the famous chili three way - spaghetti, Skyline chili and grated cheese. What a way to begin our mini-vacation! Then Friday morning we headed for downtown Cincinnati along with 5,000 other quilters. The quilt show was amazing! They have hundreds of fantastic quilts on display, and booths of vendors selling every kind of quilting supply imaginable. After five hours I walked away with only the batting I need for the graduation quilt I am making. Boy could I have gotten a good deal on a new quilting machine. It was only $15,000!
Because we were at the show until 4:30 and were meeting 6 of our relatives for supper at 6:00, we decided to drive directly to the Newport Levee where the restaurant is located instead of all the way to our hotel and back again. We enjoyed sitting outside and looking across the river at the Cincinnati skyline. This area (Ohio and Kentucky sides of the river) has really been revitalized and offer lots to do. They have been successful in drawing both tourists and locals back to their river fronts. Supper was awesome, and the restaurant allowed us to hang out and talk until after 9:00.
This morning Kathy and I went back to downtown Cincinnati to an area called Findlay Market. It is the oldest continuously running outdoor market in Ohio, and has been around for over 150 years. Knowing that my ancestors worked and shopped in the area was very exciting for me. I don't know how I missed coming to this before now. It reminds me a bit of Soulard Market back home. After that we picked up Aunt Margie and Aunt Betty (my mom's two remaining sisters) and went to the Golden Corral to meet up with a couple of cousins. We were there for 6 hours! They are so nice to us that we always go there when we come into town. They don't mind that we sit and visit that long. We dropped the aunts off around 7:00 and then came back to our neck of the woods in Kentucky. We will head for home in the morning as Jim and I have tickets to the Repertory Theater at 7:00 tomorrow night.
