Paducah

Friday after I picked Kaylee up from school, I took her right to Kokomo Airport, where she, Steve, myself, Chuck and Nathan loaded up ourselves and our baggage in the Baron and headed off to Cape Girardeau. It was IFR at Kokomo, but once we got above the clouds, it was a pretty flight over. We dropped Kaylee off, so she is spending a little time with Grandma & Grandpa for the weekend, and then we took back off and flew to Paducah. After I lifted off from Cape, we had a first-an altimeter failure. It resolved itself about 20 minutes later, as I was touching down at Paducah. Different...

Paducah is having a "Rib Festival", and the entire downtown area has been taken over with tents. There are so many types of BBQ available that you wouldn't have a clue which one to go to! We wandered around by the river, checked out the scenery, enjoyed the sights and sounds (and smells!), and ate dinner at a local place that has a nice outdoor area a story up in a wooden...gazeebo-like-thing...where I had the best "stuffed orange roughy" thing. It was Really good, and we had live blues music playing just below us on the street. Great atmosphere.

Saturday we woke up and wandered around by Mayfield, which is where Herky Green (the man the Mustang is painted to honor" is from. He has a plaque in town, and I took photos of it. Pretty neat. We also drove around Kentucky Lake, went to the various marinas including Moore's, which has a "new" restaurant on field that had the best mushroom burger I've EVER had. Nathan and I split it because it was so big, and no other portabello burger has come close to that one. Good stuff. We also went around to visit Nathan's former stomping grounds-where he went to school, where he lived, the park he played in as a kid, all that fun stuff. We came back home long enough to take a power nap, then headed back downtown to the rib festival, where we still didn't have ribs, but rather ate at a steakhouse downtown with an old school friend of Nathan's and her husband. Once again, that was one of the best steaks I've had. They know how to prepare food down here, apparently, but that was some good stuff. We topped off the evening with strawberry shortcake for the boys and a fudgy thingy for the girls, walked off a small amount of our dinner, and came back to the hotel to recuperate and get ready for tomorrow.

It's been a fun weekend. When I called Mom to talk about what time to get there tomorrow, they were at the movies, so I'm sure Kaylee is having a great time as well. It's been a nice little vacation. :)