Weekend Away

I mentioned in my Friday Favorites post that we were taking Friday off. I'm SO glad we did. We got some long overdue time away. We slept in on Friday just because we could. We did have to get up by 7 to make sure Bailey got breakfast in time (she has to eat at least 1 1/2 hours before daycamp). We took our time getting ready  and making sure we had everything we needed. I had packed most of our stuff Thursday before we got home, so we didn't have much to do. We dropped Bailey off around 9 and went to breakfast. We decided to go to Eggspectations a few minutes down the road. We've been wanting to try this place for a while, but we just haven't for some reason. I guess breakfast is a meal we usually have at home. They serve their full menu all day. Josh actually got a breakfast meal, which is not typical of him, especially if we find a place that will serve a burger for breakfast! 

I got the "Brioche Beauty", a grilled cinnamon roll with fresh fruit and yogurt. With a mimosa of course. Delicious!

 Josh got the "Eggwhat?", corned beef hash with potatoes, eggs and fresh fruit. Also delicious.

Both of our breakfasts were absolutely delicious! I used to always get something sweet for breakfast, now I'm always torn with something sweet and savory. Luckily, I have an amazing hubby who doesn't mind sharing. All of our food was great, but those potatoes were SO good! I love potatoes but I've been trying to cut down on carbs, so before this little trip, I hadn't had any in a month! I made up for it though :-).

After breakfast, we headed to Happy on Hooves in Hampstead, MD. I love driving to the more rural parts of MD. It's just so peaceful and beautiful! It reminds me of home. I was SO excited about doing this. I had horses growing up, but I haven't ridden at all in at least 8ish years or so. We got there and we met Mandy, the owner. She is super nice. She's the only person who runs the farm and she said she had sold 1400 Living Social vouchers for the deal we had! That's crazy. Anyway, we got there and met our horses. Both our horses are retired show horses. I don't have any pictures of just my horse and I since I had the camera. I didn't think about having Josh take pictures on a phone until just now. Oh well, it's OK.

 Josh and Marco. He's a big boy! He's a 12 year old Oldenburg.

 That's Mandy on Kat, and Josh and Marco. The dog is Daisy. She decided to come along with us. She's a sweetie.

I was riding Sadie. She would fall behind a little while we were going downhill and run to catch up when we were going uphill. I kind of let her go at her own pace.

 Daisy catching up after she stopped to do some sniffing.

 So pretty, I bet this ride is really gorgeous during the Fall.

 I could live here, but I think Josh would get bored. He said we would have to have a farm and lots of kids to keep us busy.

 Josh on Marco and me on Sadie. She's such a sweet girl! She's a 10 year old Quarter Horse. If you look really close, you can see another horse in the background, that's Kat's baby. He's only 2, so he's not ready to ride just yet. 

 This is Mandy's pet goat. She said she's just like a dog. I had a pet goat growing up too, so this brought back some memories for me. :-)

We had such a great time at Happy on Hooves! I'm sure we'll go back at some point. We want to take my dad when he comes to visit again. I know he would love to ride again.

After we left Hampstead, it was time to go to our next destination. I didn't know where we were going, but I kept guessing along the way. My only clues were that we were going to another state and we had about a 3 hour drive. We were planning to watch the second half of our game against UVA. We never found a good stopping point. We finally decided we would just go to a sports bar and watch the end once we got to our destination. We were driving South at first, so I thought we were maybe going to VA. Then, we started going North. My next guess was New York. I was really excited. I've wanted to go back to New York since we went a couple years ago. However, I knew Josh hadn't planned anything past our hotel room, so I wasn't sure how New York would turn out. There's just SO much to do. If you're only going for 1 night, you definitely need a bit of a gameplan or you'll be so overwhelmed when you arrive, you won't know what to do. 

 Going over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, I was pretty sure we were going to New York at this point. 

 I was wrong! I started to think Atlantic City was a possibility when we were only about 15 minutes from our ETA and I started seeing signs for Atlantic City. Josh wouldn't tell me though. Parking isn't very abundant here, so we decided to check into our hotel and go to the bar there to watch the rest of the game. We were staying at The Chelsea. Josh explained his hotel selection strategy to me as we were finding our hotel. He pointed out all the hotels he considered then told me why he didn't pick them. He also considered Tropicana, Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Plaza. I don't remember is reasoning for not picking the Trump hotels, but he didn't pick Tropicana because they didn't have any rooms available with a king bed. Silly hubby, I don't need a king bed, I'm going to sleep on the same half as you anyway. Haha. I did get a couple pictures in our room, but I wish I would have gotten more. I LOVED how it was decorated. 

 Super comfy bed!

Our view. We actually never made it out to the ocean though.

Anyway, we found our hotel and checked in. As soon as we got our stuff in the room, we went down to the bar to watch the end of our game. It was happy hour anyway, so it was perfect timing anyway. Well, we thought. Apparently this was a fancier bar and there were no TVs. It looked really nice, but we didn't stick around. We were determined to catch the end of out game. We ran back to our room and crossed our fingers that our TV had the right channel. After bypassing all the silly hotel pay-per-view stuff, we finally found our game in time to watch maybe the last minute. We won! 

We were starving, so we started looking for places to look. It was Restaurant Week and we were going to have a nice dinner later that night. We picked a place and made reservations. Once that was settled, we went out to find something to hold us over. We went to Tropicana since it was closest. There are lots of shops and restaurants inside this hotel. We actually didn't know it was part of the hotel when we went in. When you walk it, it's decorated like you're outside. I only got one picture, and it's really too dark to make anything out, but here it is.

After considering a sports bar and a Cuban place, we decided to eat at Ri Ra's Irish Pub. While I was looking at the menu, I decided I didn't want a fancy dinner later, I wanted to have dinner NOW. Haha. I mentioned it to Josh and he said that was fine and we would cancel our reservations for later. We were both starving so we got an appetizer of potato cakes. AMAZING! Josh ordered fish and chips and I got pork chops with homemade apple sauce and colcannon cakes. I didn't know it, but colcannon cakes are pretty much potato cakes with cabbage in them. I didn't even know there was cabbage until I just looked it up. I found a recipe and I think I'll try to make it this week. You couldn't taste it at all, all the food was so good!

After dinner, we walked around Tropicana a little bit more. It was like walking through a couple blocks outside. We finally found the casino and walked around it a little bit. We brought nice clothes to dress up in. Luckily we walked around before going back to our room to change, because people were in normal street clothes for the most part. We did go back to change, but we stayed in normal clothes. After that we went to Trump Plaza. We were both pretty disappointed with this place. We expected it to be really nice, but it just looked so dated compared to our hotel and Tropicana. We didn't stay long and went to Caesar's. 

 Is this the real Caesar's palace? 

We stayed at Caesar's for quite a while. This is where we finally gambled a little bit. Josh had planned on playing a little bit of poker. Before we even checked into our hotel room, we decided on an amount we could spend on gambling and agreed to not go over that amount. That way, we didn't have to worry about losing a lot of money then losing even more to get it back. Josh had originally planned on playing some poker but decided against it once he realized how expensive it would be. I thought it was $10 per game, which would have been completely fine. It was actually a minimum $10 bet. Josh explained how poker and betting worked and said that he could easily lose $200 in a hand, which may only last a few minutes. We decided to forgo that experience this time. Haha. We walked around a bit more and decided to play some video poker. Josh taught me how to play and we both had a lot of fun. 

We each played $5. I lost all of mine, but Josh won enough to make up for both of us!

After he won this, we decided to try a different casino. We went back to Tropicana and each played $5 again. 

Again, I lost all of mine, but Josh won enough to make up for both of us. We played a few more times and we ended up coming out $10 positive! Not too bad!

Tropicana was a bit nicer, it felt a little more like a club. We actually liked Caesar's a little better from the gambling standpoint. They were much more generous with their drinks.

We ended up gambling until around 1am and we were hungry. We went back into the area with all the restaurants. Well, at 1 am, all the restaurants are night clubs. We ended up going to a market where we could make our own plates, it was kind of like a buffet. We also bought some water. We ended up paying $5 for a liter and a half of water! Crazy! It didn't have a price on it or we wouldn't have bought it. We went back to our room and crashed. We slept in the next morning and got up just in time to shower and get breakfast before we had to check out.

We stopped at Applebee's to watch the majority of our game against UNC. We had a pretty good time. We were obviously disappointed, but we played a good game. We got back on the road to go pick up our Bailey!

By the way, Bailey was on vacation too. She got to stay at Camp Bow Wow while we were away. She has never boarded before and she's only stayed the night away from us once with a friend and another dog. We wanted to board her for a short time before we put her in for a week. I'm glad we did. They have webcams so we can watch her play while we're away. We were only able to check in on her once since we were so busy, but I really like that we can. She was really happy to see us Saturday evening and she was SO tired and calm. I love when we take her there!

We had an absolutely amazing weekend! I'm really glad we took a 3 day weekend for this trip. We were really tired when we got back, so it's great we've had Sunday to relax and recover from traveling.