Erie Weekend

The little girl Kristen takes care of was on vacation in Florida, so she had the whole weekend off, probably only time this summer, so we decided to do a nice little weekend road trip. I skipped Lunch Friday, left work early and got home around 3:30. Of course Im a last minute packer so had nothing ready, so I open my closet grab grab items from shelf 1 some from shelf 2 dig and grab a few things from drawer 1 and 2, grab a good pair and an old pair of tennis shoes and Bam, all packed in 5 minutes. A few minutes later Kristen is done after what seemed like forever. We loaded up the car and away we went.

Like any good road trip up 79 we had to stop at the Grove City outlets, (the plan was just for dinner). I hit 2 stores, Oakley and Timberland and magically doubled my weekend wardrobe. We went in a few kitchen supply stores, some novelty stores and of course had to stop in the Coach store which had to be the smallest most crowded area of the ENTIRE outlets. After all the walking around we were hungry enough to go to the foodcourt and get dinner, Charley's Steakery. mmmmm. We then hit the road again with about an hour and a half to.

We type in the hotel we are staying at into the GPS on our new phones and immediately tells us we are not on a road. Im thinking the thing must be broke cause 79 is a major road, and then it reconnects to the system and all of a sudden we are found again and on a road. After working our way through the city of Erie, we Found our hotel.

We made reservations for this hotel Knights Inn through some Trip Rewards thing that Kristen has. Pictures make everything look so much better. First it used to be a Super 8, and there was just a little 3' x5' canvas sign hung up saying it was the Knights Inn, if we didnt have GPS we wouldnt have found it. We go check in and there were these 2 young guys at the desk. One thing we wanted to do was go to some wineries this weekend so we ask where are some good ones. They respond that they have no idea what a winery is, so we descirbe it to them, place you make wine, then they understand and procede to tell us there is a pizza shop that they think sells wine around the corner. By this time I am trying not to laugh because they were just not understanding what we were trying to ask for, and the other guy go gets his laptop and gives us the name and address of the most expensive restaurant in Erie saying they should have wine, we decided to just look in the phone book. The guys also told us there was a huge car cruise thing going on down on State street, 2 blocks away. After getting the car unloaded we decided to go down and check it out, Im assuming we must have missed it or something because there were maybe 2 older corvettes and a few '50s cars, nothing I would call a huge car cruise/show. We decided to go back to the hotel and call it a night.

We get woken up at 5:30 in the am by some brat little kid bouncing his soccerball outside our door. After several failed attempts and falling back asleep we decide to get up at 7:00 and go get the continental breakfast, you know cold coffee, warm milk, stale danish and bagels with broken toaster. We got back to the room wrote down the names and addresses of wineries and headed to the beach. It was freezing at the beach and the water was really cold. Of course I had to see how far I could get in the water without getting my clothes wet, just as I thought it was a foot closer to shore than I was. Big wave came and got the middle 2 inches of my shorts soaked, I had them cuffed up so I could go in farther. We took some pictures then walked down to the next beach are to see the lighthouse and took more pictures, then it started to rainso we got back to the car and headed to do some wine tasting.

I forget the names of the places we went too but got a bottle of wine from each. The first one we went into gave tours of the winery, not what I expected at all. I guess they could be considered micro-wineries. They had like 20 1000 gallon distilling tanks, a press and a botteling machine. It wasnt fall so no grapes so nothing was running or working. it was still an informative tour that lasted about 15-20 minutes. They had 5 barrels aging, I was expecting rows and stacks of barrels like on tours you see on tv. After the tour we tried a few fines, bought one and were on our way to the next.

We were looking for an ice wine. Its a rarer type of wine that cant be produced every year. The key is to leave the grapes on the vines until the first frost, hopefully the frost comes early enough before the grapes rot on the vines. The grapes then have to be picked and squeezed while still frosted which is supposed to make a much sweeter fruitier wine that is supposed to be excellant. The second place we went to had it, but you couldnt taste it so we bought a bottle. They had a bunch of other fruit wines like peach, apple, rasberry, cherry all kinds. We went to a few more places and tried a few more wines before heading to the Smugglers Wharf for an early dinner.

We then went to the Tom Ridge Center, to watch a movie called Mysteries of the Great Lakes. Sounds like it could be a real interesting show, maybe stuff on shipwrecks, and some other cool things, we were wrong. It was a show on how they aree trying to reintroduce lake sturgeon to different areas of the great lakes that no longer have sturgeon population due to overfishing and consumption of caviar. Though interesting was completely not expected from a title such as MYSTERIES OF THE GREAT LAKES.

Sunday we went to the lake Erie Maritime Museum which was cool. They had a replica side of a ship showing the damage from real canon fire and all kinds of other neat artifacts from the battle of lake Erie of the war of 1812. We then grabbed Arby's for a late lunch and headed on home.