good weekend!

Saturday morning we took off for Eau Claire, to visit the Leinenkugel Brewery and take the tour. We got about an hour outside of Eau Claire, and traffic stopped. Literally stopped. To the point where people were out of their cars on the side of the interstate, walking around. Letting their dogs go potty. Going potty themselves. We moved about 2 miles in nearly an hour. We were told at one point, by a guy that had passed this part of the interstate going the other direction, that they were doing road work on a bridge and re-routing people off at the exit and right back on. probably kinda hard with 3 lanes of weekend traffic. well, by the time we got to the point where they were supposedly doing the road work, it was gone. so all that waiting and nothing to show for it. there could have at least been an accident to see! We proceeded from there, and got to our tour just a few minutes late. they put us at the 3:45pm tour though, so we sampled some beer (it's free!!!) and checked out the gift shop. Our tour started, and it was pretty cool. It was the weekend, so they weren't actually brewing, but we saw the equipment. The fermentation tanks hold a LOT of beer. you'd have to drink 4 a day for 79 years to get through one! Each batch turns out 175 barrells, and each barrell is 15 (?) cases. The produce a lot of beer. (I wish I had taken this computer with me to blog while we were at our hotel!) Anyway, it was pretty neat, we got some good gift store stuff, and headed to our hotel. We were in downtown Eau Claire at the Ramada. We went to Sammy's Pizza at a friends recommendation. Yum!!! It was dang good! From there we relaxed, had ice cream at the Acoustic Cafe, and walked around a bit. Then we went to a budget movie theater and saw Mr. & Mrs. Smith. We both really liked it. Especially for $2.50! Sunday morning we left a bit early to go to Erbert & Gerbert's for a Jacob Bluefinger. I hadn't had one in SO long. It was tasty! We left Eau Claire hoping to not see the traffic snafu we had on Saturday. Luckily, it didn't happen this time! However, we did have some annoying road-sharers. one girl was driving on practically a 1/2 tire on the passenger side (rear). her car also sounded really bad. the annoying part was that she kept changing her speed...passing us and slowing down. we didn't want to be by her car. she ended up passing us, and a couple minutes later, who should be pulling off to the side of the road but her....with a flat tire. it was funny. well, to us anyway!
We decided we had enough time, so we stopped at Ho-Chunk. I spent some money, Dave made some money, and we headed out. THEN we hit the traffic. We got off the interstate, took some back road, and made it to his parents' for A's birthday party. We're home now, waiting for "My Kind of Town" to come on. Mt. Horeb, WI is being featured tonight!
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