Can't Read My, No, He Can't Read My Poker Face

Okay. So, I'm going in the Way Back Machine, to Saturday, July 15th. It really feels like about 6 months ago.

Anyway, we woke up to the beautiful scenery of the moon, the bluffs and a bald eagle flying overhead. None of us got much sleep (except John) on account of the late night, drunken shenanigans by the other campers.

We decided to pack up and head into town.

We noticed they had a farmer's market downtown and went to check it out.

Decorah has a large Norwegian population, so we bought ourselves some Norwegian food at the Farmer's Market. Mmmmmm.

We got some coffee and wandered around downtown.

Then we drove over to the Falls that aren't too far from downtown.

I even got to crawl around on the rocks. One of my favorite things to do.

The scenery was gorgeous...

...And my family was hilarious.

It was nice to get to spend time with the girls too.

We tried to check out the ice cave, but we didn't get very far in. We still have no idea if that's as far as anyone got, or if there was another entrance somewhere that we missed.

We did get a nice album cover shot, and that's important.

We got barbecue for lunch and when we drove past the local bike shop, I saw there were cages outside. When we were done, I asked John and the girls if they minded stopping by there and checking out what I thought were rabbits.

It turned out they were kittens, which was even better. The last thing John said to me when we got out of the car was, "We aren't taking any of them home!"

He did relent and come up and pet some of them with us, but we didn't take any home. Although, that would have been the sweetest birthday present.

We had reserved some innertubes to float down the river, but they told us to come there at around 3. Since we had some time to kill, we checked out the Pulpit Rock Brewery and had a beer before we hit the river.

The float was very nice. We only did it for an hour, because we wanted to check into our hotel room and make our dinner reservation, but as we were all tubing, we wished we had done the longer route.

We had dinner at Rubiyat and it was perfect.

The food was amazing and the service was great.

I even had birthday "cake" - a half fudge and half salted caramel brownie with ice cream and strawberries. It's like it was made for me.

After dinner, we decided to check out the Courtyard and Cellar bar. We walked by it in the afternoon and thought it looked pretty cool.

We sat outside at first, but it looked like it might storm, so we headed down to the basement bar.

We found a bunch of board games down there, but decided to get out the deck of cards I bought the girls when we were in DC and John taught the girls how to play poker. We played for pennies, so it wasn't extemely cut throat, but the girls did have a lot of fun teasing me about how I don't know how to shuffle. So, drinking and gambling - just good, old fashioned, wholesome, family fun...

By about 11, I was getting ever so sleepy, so we headed back to the hotel room. I wanted to be nice and perky for my actual birthday the next day. If it was going to be anything like Saturday, I would definitely need to rest up for it.