Anniversary Vacation

Jason and I spent the weekend in Omaha, Nebraska, celebrating our fifth wedding anniversary. I made hotel reservations back in April and thought the hotels were pricey, but didn't think anything of it. We found out why when we checked in. The college world series, little league competition and some USSA thing was in town as well. There were an extra 100,000 people in Omaha. No wonder the hotel was expensive! We had a wonderful time, despite the extra people. We left Thursday night and got to Omaha around 10pm. The hotel wasn't bad...it wasn't great, but the only complaint we had was that the breakfast they had didn't have a lot of choices and wasn't very good. And the only tv stations they had that weren't sports stations were the local channels, TBS, USA, TNT, and Showtime.

Friday morning, I packed us some lunch and we headed to the zoo. For those of you who have never been to Omaha, the zoo is right next to Rosenblatt stadium, where the college world series is played. The traffic wasn't too bad since the games didn't actually start until Saturday. The zoo was awesome! We had such a good time. It started as an overcast and slightly chilly day, so we went to the Lied Jungle part first. I felt like Indiana Jones. We crossed a rope bridge that was next to a waterfall. After the jungle, we started looking at a lot of the outside exhibits. We were able to watch the sea lions get fed.
We had ice cream as a treat and decided it was a good idea for us to bring our own lunch. (A hot dog cost $6! I could buy two packages of hot dogs, buns and still have money leftover for that price!) We decided to follow the path to some more exhibits which eventually wound us around to one of the gates. We went and had lunch in our car, since it had started to rain. Lucky for us, what we had left to look at were mostly inside exhibits, so we weren't in the rain too much. We did get to see a lot of Zara's distant relatives.

After the zoo we headed back to our hotel room. Once it stopped raining, and we were getting hungry, we headed to the Old Market district. We had supper at a really good Italian restaurant. Jason even convinced me that we should get dessert.

On Saturday, we headed to Ashland, Nebraska to the Strategic Air and Space Museum. It was such a neat place! When you walk in, you are greeted by a SR-71 Blackbird. There were so many planes and displays. We were there for several hours. We even went on the guided tour (they have one a day, Monday through Saturday) where the tour guide was able to tell some history of a lot of the planes they had there. (He also told us that if someone offers you a ride in a plane that starts with an "X," don't get in it! The "X" means it's experimental!) Some of the pilots that had flown the planes they have on display, live in the area. It was definitely worth the drive.

We spent most of the afternoon looking for the store Beertopia. I finally called the store to get directions. The clerk was not exactly helpful, but he did offer to come pick us up if we got lost. We did find it and Jason got a few beers that the clerk recommended. He looks forward to drinking them.

We met up with Jason's friend Nick and Nick's wife Maggie at the Upstream Brewing Company for supper. The food was good, but the company was even better. Nick used to work at CyRide with Jason. It was fun hearing about how they adapted to Omaha.

We left around 10am on Sunday. The only place we really wanted to go to would have had us fighting the college world series traffic. We decided that Omaha isn't that far away, and we'd just have to come back. We stopped in Ankeney for lunch and got home around 1:30 2ish. When we opened the door, Zara was mewing like crazy. Needless to say, we're glad we're back home, but we had a fantastic vacation! (I posted a lot of our vacation pictures on our flickr website. Just click on the link on the side to see them!)