Finally, a real vacation

[dorchadas]

ae were originally planning to go visit sashagee's family in January, but her wisdom teeth removal took a lot out of her so she was down for almost a month. Recently she's recovered enough to actually travel, though, so we borrowed her parents' car and on Friday, after I finished work, I met her at a train station (she and Laila having already gone to her parents' house the previous day) and we drove down to Muncie.

We were there through Sunday and we didn't really do anything touristy or exciting. We were there to see sashagee's grandmother and mother, and that's what we did. Laila ran around her great-grandmother's house, grabbing pens and wanting to draw, playing with teacups, asking to watch Ghibli movies, while we played with her, ate some cheesecake that sashagee and her mother made, relaxed, and slept on the incredibly uncomfortable beds in the hotel room. The second day we were there, Laila was so wound up from having a fun time playing with everyone all day that she couldn't fall asleep until past 11 p.m.! And this after her first words when we got to the hotel room were "Go home" and trying to put her shoes back on.

She was definitely still glad to be home, though. Traveling is nice, but it's also nice to be home.

The most interesting thing to write about--having a three-year-old drag you away so she can make you "egg tea" is a lot of fun in the moment but about all I can write about it is what's in that sentence--was during Laila's nap on Saturday, when sashagee and I went to the nearby Minnetrista Museum to see the Bob Ross Experience.


During the Plague Years I made it a habit to watch the marathons of Bob Ross shows that Twitch did on weekends, and when I told sashagee about it when she was pregnant with Laila, she spent some of her time when she was bedridden watching Bob Ross's soothing voice as he drew his trees and mountains and rivers and Twitch chat speculated on the chance of cabin. I saw an advertisement for the Bob Ross exhibit on the road as we were leaving the interstate at the Muncie exit, and when I told sashagee about it, she agreed when we had to go. We took advantage of Laila's nap to slip out and visit the Minnetrista Museum, paid the entrance fee, and looked around.

The campus was much bigger than I thought--I had only seen the ad for the exhibit and had no idea that there were gardens, old houses built by prominent Muncie citizens in the 19th century, a large exhibit about the Ball Stores which I had never even heard of before--no surprise, most of them went out of business before sashagee was born so she had no experience to tell me about them--an art exhibition by local Native artisans, and probably some other things I didn't notice. Unfortunately, we only had a couple hours and it was cold and raining outside, so we skipped most of the exhibits and after checking out the Ball Stores exhibit we went over to the Bob Ross house.

This was the original location of filming, in a house so old that one of the exhibits mentioned a warning went out to prevent anyone from using the bathroom (the pipes would bang loudly enough to be heard on camera) or walking down a particular hallway (it was too squeaky). Other than the room where filming was performed, depicted above, the rest of the exhibit were paintings done on the show, various artifacts from filming like original furniture, and upstairs, a space where a workshop on Ross's particular painting techniques was being held. It wasn't particularly large--the space where the Native exhibition was being held seemed like it was a bigger space--but it was a nice diversion, and it was nice to see exhibits that contrasted the pre-show paintings that Ross would use as references while he was painting and the on-show paintings he did. The pre-show paintings were obviously more detailed, but in some cases it felt like a progression, or that Ross had an idea while he was painting on the show and took the painting in a new direction. There were only a couple exhibits of that type, but they were the most interesting and I wish there had been more.

Also, it made me interested to go back and see what all those other places on the Minnetrista campus are. Maybe next time!