John and I finally decided to take a vacation that we had been planning for two years…the Kentucky Bourbon Trail! We originally had planned to visit for one of John’s milestone birthdays, but life happened and it didn’t work out for us. I never forgot about it and planned to make it happen for him for his birthday this year. We decided to make a road trip out of it since we had to make a stop in Cleveland before heading down to Kentucky.

My dad’s birthday is in July and I always get us tickets to go to a Yankees game (we are lifelong fans) and this year they happened to be playing in Cleveland. So I figured we could all meet up for the game and then John and I could continue our trip down to Kentucky.

I must preface my vacation recap by saying that I took some awesome pictures on our trip and then the day after we got home my phone crapped out on me and I lost everything back to February (when I last backed up). I am happy to report that I am backed up to the Cloud now, but those pictures are gone. I had to piece my recaps together with what I had posted on social media and the pictures John took – but just know that I had some really great pictures for you.

We drove down to Cleveland mid-afternoon and checked into our hotel, the Aloft Cleveland which was pretty close to the stadium. Cleveland is a great town to explore – for ideas check out my previous Cleveland trip.

We headed over to meet up with my dad at Progressive Field where the Cleveland Indians play. If you’ve never been it is a fun stadium to go to. Plus I love hearing John Adams play his legendary drum.

I’m going to show you a little before and after picture, because this ended up being a crazy game lasting for 16 innings! You can see in the second picture that nobody is left. I found this article that had some crazy numbers from this game. The final score was 5-4 and the game took five hours and four minutes to play. How weird is that? Even though the Yankees lost it was still a great game to watch and since it was only the second Yankees game we got to attend this year we definitely got our money’s worth!

The next day before we took off, we stopped for lunch at The Willeyville next to our hotel.

Courtesy of The Willeyville as my photo was lost from the great phone fiasco.

This will forever be remembered as the day I introduced John to a Bloody Mary. I didn’t realize that he hadn’t had one before or else I would have tried before now. He loved mine and ended up getting one for himself.

We had a blast and I will tell you more about the Kentucky Bourbon Trail in my next post! What are your favorite places in Cleveland?

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