Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: On Day 2, We Looked at Art and Walked across a Bridge

 

When I was planning Matt's birthday trip, I was actually looking for ideas more around Nashville, because I'm still paranoid about both of us traveling too far away from our nearly grown-up teenagers. It's probably very Smother Mother-ish of me, and I don't even care.

But then I saw a TikTok about the fantasy art exhibit at the Hunter Art Museum, and THEN I Googled and saw that there's also a free-play pinball museum there, and a few weeks later, there Matt and I were in Chattanooga!

I really wish we'd done more than drive through Chattanooga when the kids were small, because they would have LOVED IT HERE. On our morning walk to the Hunter, Matt and I passed the Tennessee Aquarium--

--including a plaza out front with a free splash pad and wading stream meant to resemble the Tennessee River just north of it.

We followed the stream past the aquarium, then turned down The Passage towards the Tennessee Riverwalk--

--and found an equally beautiful and interactive memorial to the Trail of Tears and the experience of the Cherokee Nation:

There were interpretive signs for all the symbols, and you could enter the stream at any point, walking down the steps towards the river in a graphic representation of the Trail of Tears.

At the bottom, there was another wading area. Children could play here, in this gentle reminder of former tragedy, and families could enjoy their time together here. 

I love it when spaces overtly defy the intentions of the original acts of cruelty that led to the need for a memorial.

It was a cloudy day for the Tennessee Riverwalk--

--but nevertheless I was stoked, because the forecast had told me it would probably be pouring all day. We hardly got rained on at all, so yay!

THIS is why we came to Chattanooga!

Matt and I both love fantasy fiction. He loves fantasy video games, and I used to play D&D like mad (I'm a half-elf bard at heart, y'all), so this was the BEST exhibit for us!

Prince Valiant is still running, and it is so good!

This is Grendel's Mother, by Yoann Lossel, because fantasy art isn't all dragons and skeleton pirates:

But SOME of it is dragons!

I don't think I owned the D&D guide this art was on the cover of, but I've definitely seen it and used it!

This artist, Scott Fischer, also did the cover of Peter Pan in Scarlet:

And look what else I found!!! DINOTOPIA!!!!!!!

The family love affair with Dinotopia is a long one, and I'm always thrilled to see Dinotopia in the wild! I've just learned that James Gurney actually sells prints of his Dinotopia art, and OMG I want them.

It was really fun to see all these illustrations from beloved books. Here's an Arthur Rackham illustration:

I've got his illustrated Alice in Wonderland, but I think of him more as a fairy tale illustrator.

And here's an illustration from The Lost World:

We did The Mysterious Island as a family read-aloud one magical year, and I remain nostalgic for all things Arthur Conan Doyle.

Here's just the "do not touch" sign at the base of a giant Bigfoot bust:

And here's the skeleton pirate I referenced!

That's another James Gurney illustration. 

This exhibit was presented by the Norman Rockwell Museum, because apparently Normal Rockwell was really into fantasy art. I went to the museum's website to buy the exhibition catalogue and accidentally got completely sucked into learning more about Norman Rockwell and his art--I thought of him as a painter of schlocky sentimental subjects, but then I watched this virtual exhibition of his Civil Rights art and now I'm hooked. 

After looking at every single thing in the Enchanted exhibition twice, we eventually made our way into the rest of the museum and looked at the rest of the American art!

self-portrait in a fancy plate

Diamond in Milk by Amber Cowan, using thrifted, upcycled, and found glass

Efflorescence, by Judith Schaechter

Under the Sun, by Andy Saftel

I found a quilt!

Black Star Family, First Class Tickets to Liberia

This is so timely, because I recently met with one of my Girl Scouts who's working on a Gold Award project about introducing more Bipoc authors and artists into her classical school's curriculum. We had a great discussion about the politics and power dynamics involved in determining whether an artwork or piece of literature is "canonical," and one of the examples that we discussed was types of art that aren't traditionally recognized as such, but are still art, like quilts. I'd been thinking more about the Gee's Bend quilts when I brought up that example, but here's another quilt!

I really like the details, especially the use of netting and tulle to add shading to parts of the quilt:

Matt laughed at me for taking pictures of the seating, but you guys, this is what it is to be known!

Seriously, why are museums so freaking exhausting?!? You're just walking around really slowly and standing a lot! WHY AM I SO TIRED AND MY FEET HURT?!?

Rule #1: When you find a mirror, you take a selfie!

I'm a bad vacation photographer, because I think this is our only photo together during the whole trip. Oops!

I did take a lot of photos of Matt, though. Here he is becoming art!

I also pestered the kids by constantly sending them pictures of art that they'd think was funny. Like, here is literally a photo of Matisse:

His muse was apparently 500 pigeons!

And here's an actual photo of me when I get some bread:

When we eventually made it out to the sculpture garden, I was happily amazed to see that it still wasn't raining on us!

And that meant that we could achieve my afternoon plan of walking around the sculpture garden--

--and across the Walnut St. Bridge!

There's the Hunter Art Museum behind me:

Matt does not like to stand near the edge of things, but he consented for this one photo:

Another view east, with the Hunter and a little island in the middle of the Tennessee River:

And the view west:

We didn't go over to this carousel, but I love seeing another antique carousel out in the world being used and loved!

I was VERY sad that the restaurant I'd been hoping to eat at had a sign on its front door saying it was closed for remodeling, so instead we went to a Mexican restaurant so I could eat a quesadilla and drink a spicy margarita.

My spicy margarita was super deliciously spicy, and the waitress said that the bartenders infuse the tequila with jalapeños to make it. So now I have another project for my to-do list!

Don't tell the kids, but afterwards we did a tiny bit of shopping to fill up their Christmas stockings:

Did you know that Chattanooga is the home of the Moonpie? I think Moonpies are gross, but the kids are thrilled by them, so we brought them home a bundle.

Fun Chattanooga street art:

After a while the clouds were starting to look more looming, so we walked back to the hotel to read, nap, swim, and eat leftovers for dinner. 

And then we ate at the most touristy ice cream shop in the country:

I promise that I did have some local, indie, authentic ice cream shops pinned on my Google Map, but Ben & Jerry's was both closer and, when we got home and I told the kids where we'd eaten, they acted like we had gone to the White House and shaken Daddy Biden's hand, they were so amazed and astounded that Ben & Jerry's! Has a real storefront! Where you can get Phish Food in a waffle cone!

Never let it be said that we do not live large on our grown-up vacations!

Labor Day Weekend in Chattanooga: On Day 1, We Drink Moonshine and Learn about Boy Meets World

For Matt's 45th birthday, I decided to take advantage of having two nearly grown teenagers who can drive themselves to school and work and cook their own meals and keep the house tidy and presumably handle any small emergency that arises, and leave them alone at home to do just that while Matt and I took ourselves on a quick little road trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee!

Okay, fine. I'm still seething with jealousy at the super fun trip Matt and Will took to Peru and I wanted to go on a super fun trip, too, but my children are too busy to go with me and the only way I could get Matt to take off work for yet another vacation was to tell him it was his birthday present. Ahem.

And I had an absolutely wonderful time, thank you very much! I leaned fully into the road trip aesthetic, with car snacks and 1,000 podcasts (we ended up binging Pod Meets World, because who doesn't love Topanga?). Matt drove the entire way, leaving me more time to peruse the handfuls of travel brochures that I gathered at every rest stop. I now have a collection of brochures for every tourable cave between here and Georgia, and one day I AM GOING TO SEE THEM ALL!

I missed the kids terribly, but I texted them photos of every cute dog and gas station novelty food I saw:

If the kids had been with me I'd definitely have gone for these.

We'd also have 100% bought ourselves $1 Slurpees. Instead, I bought myself a 59-cent soda and a bag of Sour Patch candies that was ALL CHERRIES!

It's a six-hour drive from here to Chattanooga, but there are a couple of interesting-looking distilleries about halfway there, and we enjoyed our last distillery tour so much that we picked one to stop at. 

Casey Jones Distillery offers a guided tour and a bourbon tasting, and we wisely did the bourbon tasting first so that we wouldn't be too tipsy to drive, although it did mean that we didn't know as much about what we wanted to taste as we would have if we'd done the tour first. But even without the full history lesson we'd get during the tour, I got a kick (both a "Kentucky hug" and a historical thrill!) out of tasting Casey's Cut, the original moonshine recipe that the original "Casey" Jones developed when he was a moonshiner hiding out from the revenuers. Matt really liked this one, and that's actually what we ended up buying a bottle of. 

Casey Jones Distillery is a LOT smaller than Member's Mark, so it was interesting to see the contrasts during our guided tour. The history of how the two companies developed is also completely different, and although I had been interested in hearing about the scientific process of choosing the perfect grain combination, I was flat-out fascinated hearing about the history of illegal moonshine production in rural Kentucky. I'm amazed that economically and educationally disenfranchised people could have figured out the chemical and mechanical requirements to create stills from scratch, with no blueprints or written instructions, but Matt noted that many Kentuckians had emigrated from Scotland, with its own history of whisky, so possibly there was some word-of-mouth instruction or even memories of that process. In the 1600s, Scotland even had its own version of revenuers and black market whisky manufactured in small, hidden stills!

I wish the kids could have come with us on the tour of the working still, because look at all that lovely fermenting bacteria that Syd could have seen!

Hmmm, maybe we should try to catch some wild yeast and make our own sourdough again. That would be another good culinary extension to her biology study!

Here's an original Casey Jones still. He built it for the FBI, at their request, after his imprisonment and subsequent retirement, and it's now a display piece above the distillery's bar:

And here's a working model of that still, a copy built by Casey's grandson, AJ:

This is the still that makes all of the bourbon sold by Casey Jones Distillery. They were running the still while we were there, so we got to watch the glass jugs being filled--

--AND we got to taste some moonshine fresh from the still!

Casey Jones doesn't have a rickhouse or big bottling area like Member's Mark. Here's its storage and bottling area in one:

We got another history lesson just on the handcrafted wooden barrels used to age bourbon:

The cooperage will even fire the inside according to the distillery's specifications, and it's the burnt inside of the barrel that colors the finished bourbon:

You can apparently buy used staves, complete with the burned side and the devil's cut of bourbon saturated inside. Our tour guide said they're awesome for smoking meat.

It probably didn't help that I was tipsy, but I got SUPER into the history of moonshining and its impact on the local economies here. Here's a display of artifacts that I pored over:

And here's a $35, spiral-bound, self-published book written by Casey Jones, himself, that I REALLY wanted but did not buy:

It was so awesome. It was essentially all photocopied from original typewritten pages, and the preface consisted of Jones, with lots of spelling errors and grammar mistakes, writing about how now that he was old he wished he'd taken his education more seriously, but also, it was brilliant and had such a vivid authorial voice. My favorite kind of outsider art! I had the thought that maybe I could interlibrary loan it when I got home, but of course it has no ISBN or Worldcat or OCLC entry. I'll just have to go back to Hopkinsville one day and buy it!

After the distillery, we were both starving and frankly, I was still a little tipsy, so we ate barbecue. It was freaking delicious, and I'm still sad that I ate so much pulled pork that I didn't have room for pie. 

On a previous family road trip years ago, we very briefly detoured into Chattanooga, but it didn't help us with wayfinding AT ALL. Genuinely helpful was our hotel's location just across the street from a minor league baseball field, and imagine my delight when at the conclusion of that evening's game, they had a fireworks show!

And because I'd planned the trip, I'd been able to pick a much nicer hotel than Matt would have been happy springing for. BUT it was in easy walking distance of almost everything we wanted to do and was super roomy and comfy.

Matt definitely made fun of me for having my name on the TV, though...

And I got to text the kids to show them that no matter where you go, you'll always have an Office marathon!

When my Girl Scout troop was in Montgomery, Alabama, some of the kids had really wanted to order Mellow Mushroom pizza, but it was closed. I was excited, then, to see that not only was there a Mellow Mushroom in Chattanooga, BUT it was open AND it was only a couple of blocks from our hotel!

Unfortunately, it tasted really gross, soft and almost undercooked:

Good thing I had the foresight to pack all those car snacks! 

The Harper Tunic: My First Try

 

The good news: this Harper Tunic is easily the most comfortable item of clothing that I own, second only to my four-year-old Black Panther-branded jersey knit jammy pants.

The bad news: it's so roomy that it's probably unwearable on any occasion in which I care what I look like. That's not many occasions, true, but it's not none occasions!

Even though I've been sewing constantly for 18 years (my first project was a ring sling for tiny baby Will!), I can count on one hand the articles of clothing that I have actually sewn for myself---including that ring sling! I've sewn countless garments for the kids, and even a few things for Matt, but I am very much a novice, still, at sewing for my own body.

For the Harper Tunic, I'm on the cusp between the OSP and OSP2 sizes. The Chest measurement for the OSP is 38"-45", and the OSP2 is 45"-52"; my chest measurement is 45". I'm solidly in the OSP2 range with a Waist measurement of 42.5", but I'm again on the cusp between two sizes with my Hip measurement of 49"; the OSP is 42"-49", and the OSP2 is 49"-56". I read somewhere as I was researching this pattern that I should opt for the larger size if I was between measurements, so that's what I did. 

I sewed this tunic from an $8 cotton sheet from Goodwill--Goodwill's prices have gotten RIDICULOUS, so please don't tell them that their sheet prices are still reasonable, lest they up those, too, and I lose my favorite source of affordable fabric! This was mostly intended to be a muslin, so I'm not super sad that I don't love it. Instead, it's like a bonus that it's wearable at all, even if its entire lifespan will be spent with me doing kitchen and yardwork.

Because look at those pockets!

I added a matching pocket on the opposite side of the tunic, and now I have enough room in my pockets to fit five five-week-old kittens:

I mean, they don't hate it...

My next step will be to cut down my pattern to the smaller size and try it again--I've got a $4 dark red sheet already picked out for it, so I'm pretty stoked. Will is still in the process of assembling her Harper Tunic pattern--so far, her sewing lessons have consisted of the fact that cutting and assembling pdf patterns SUCK!!!!!--but I think I'm going to have her cut her pattern down another size, too, as she is also on the cusp of two sizes and unlike me, she would majorly loathe wearing an oversized shirt.

I mean, she's also probably going to loathe wearing matching shirts with her mother, but to be honest, she's kind of oblivious so there's a good chance she won't even notice...

Week 2 with the Foster Kittens: Five Weeks Old and Full of Trouble!

Socks

Whenever I look back at photos of all of our former litters of foster kittens, I ask myself why on earth I didn't take MORE photos of them? They're so cute and little! Did I not appreciate what I had while I had it?!?

I appreciated it all right. I just keep forgetting that it is nearly impossible to take a decent photo of a small kitten, much less five of them. Someone is always in motion, always blurry, always running out of frame. 

That's not my vibe so much. Everyone else can play with them, wrestle and dangle ribbons and toss curly strips of paper towel tube for them to chase. All I want is a kitten to sleep on my lap and purr while I pet it.

And when that happens, I take a photo!

Socks and Anchovy

Athena

Pickle

We've been moving them between their nighttime accommodations, the children's bathroom, and their daytime accommodations, my bathroom, since for several days they seemed happy enough to use the litter box, but also happy enough to simply squat wherever they were and pee on my floor.

This means we got a lot of fun bathroom floor photos in between doing a sanitary load of laundry and deep cleaning two bathrooms every single day!

Anchovy and Taboo

Taboo

Athena

They're more reliable in the past couple of days (although that back corner under my desk remains an unholy temptation...), so they've gotten to also hang out in my bedroom and nap on the bed, and every now and then a lucky kitten gets to come out and sit on the couch with us.

Anchovy

Anchovy

And sometimes a couple of them get to ride around the rest of the house in a shirt pocket...

Taboo and Athena

They are not very helpful when I'm trying to get some work done:

Pickle

So then you've got to distract them like you do any other ipad baby:

Socks

I still prefer when they lie on me and sleep and purr, though. Obviously, when you're catlocked, you have to stop doing all your productive things and instead play on your phone or nap while the baby's napping.

Socks

They've all been very good kittens this week and hit the one-pound mark, even little Pickle, who had insisted on remaining 15 ounces after all the other babies blew past her. For some reason, a few days ago all the kittens decided that they hated their canned kitten food, so Syd fixed up her go-to Plan B of baked chicken pureed in a blender with a little water, famous as the food that finally got Buttons, the runt from her last foster litter, to decide that eating solid food was a route she wanted to pursue. The kittens are ALL ABOUT the pureed chicken now, but now that they're all over a pound, Syd's next big challenge is to wean them off it and back onto regular kitten food. 

Chicken is too expensive to be feeding it to kittens that could eat their nice kibble perfectly well if they weren't so picky!

Holiday World, and the Magic of Local Amusement Parks

One of the family traditions that I cherish the most is our yearly day trip to Holiday World, a semi-local indie theme park. It started many years ago, solely because two tickets to Holiday World has always been a prize choice for selling 600 boxes of Girl Scout cookies (this year that prize moved up to 650 boxes, because inflation). The first year that the kids sold over 600 boxes of cookies, they excitedly picked out those tickets as prizes, and we had SO much fun there that they've made it a point to choose that prize every year since.

When I was a kid, some of my favorite vacations were trips to semi-local indie theme parks. Dogpatch USA had better theming, but Silver Dollar City had better rides. I was a nervous kid who had trouble learning social scripts, so I particularly adored the feeling of visiting one of these parks a second or third time in my childhood, already knowing the best rides and what I wanted to see the most and what the day, in general, would look like. I no longer have any of those connections with where I grew up, but I really love seeing my kids have a similar relationship to this theme park. It's a cozy, familiar feeling, and it makes me happy to feel like their childhoods have this connection with mine.

The Theming

The theming is pretty brilliant, because holidays aren't copyrighted! It also makes for a fun game of trying to think of new holiday-based lands and rides that should be added. While waiting in line for Wildebeest this year, Matt, Will and I fully fleshed out the New Year's Eve land that the park should totally do--there could be a Tower of Terror-esque drop ride, and an all-ages dance club, and it could be the one area in the park that serves alcohol. We also need a Land of Lesser Holidays, with a St. Patrick's Day dark ride with a leprechaun playing tricks, and an Easter Space Ranger Spin-based dark ride where you can hunt Easter eggs. 

The actual Holiday World decorations are kind of cheezy, because I don't know when they were last updated but it was certainly before we started going--also, I think this cat used to move?

But I swear that it's part of the charm! 

The Rides

I'm not a particular coaster enthusiast, but I know that many of the roller coasters at Holiday World are considered quite special. Three of the four big coaster are wooden, which is apparently a big deal, although to me, a wooden roller coaster mostly means that you're going to get the crap beat out of you while you ride it. I literally have bruises today from riding The Legend this weekend!

I LOVE the chalkboard drawing of the Headless Horseman, and the way that one of the ride operators rings a giant school bell every time the coaster launches, and all the covered bridges that you go through.

With The Raven, I like checking on my car in the parking lot from the top of the lift hill, and I like flying over the pond. 

I also like to ride it again on our way out, because the path from the back to the front of the park is entirely uphill OMG, but The Raven's exit is a little closer to the park entrance than where you get on, so you've 1) saved some steps, 2) had a little rest, and 3) got your adrenalin up for the last bit of the walk.

The Voyage is Will's favorite coaster, and she said this weekend that her personal goal is to ride it four times every visit.

This one in particular about scared the ever-loving snot out of me the first time I rode it, because I had no idea it was going to go THROUGH the ground, then off into the woods, and then I just kept riding it and riding it and thinking, "Surely the ride should have been over by now? Did I die and now I'm riding a roller coaster forever?"

The Thunderbird is Matt's favorite roller coaster. He likes it because it's smooth and it's over quickly, because he doesn't actually like roller coasters:

I think The Thunderbird is super disorienting, because I have to take my glasses off and then it's just flipping me all over the place.

The Holiday World gift shop was offering very nifty little metal models of all of their roller coaster tracks this year, and I LOVED them and thought they would be awesome souvenirs, but just between us, I ain't paying 35 dollars for a spontaneous souvenir. We already spent 35 dollars on a drive-through McDonald's breakfast that morning, something that's so infrequent that when the kids were looking through the McDonald's breakfast menu on my phone, Will literally read the description of the McGriddle out loud to us, her mind blown at the miracle of modern fast food technology. I will cherish in my heart forever the memory of her exclaiming from the backseat, "It's got pancake buns!!! With MAPLE SYRUP FLAVORING!!!" Like, what magic will the world offer her next?

Anyway, I wanted a tiny metal roller coaster model and I didn't buy one. I did find the company that makes them, though, and see? They're super cute! 

The Shows

I was VERY SAD to learn that this year, Holiday World didn't have a full-on original musical production going on, but instead had a comedy juggler and a comedy magician. We went to see the comedy magician, and it was miserable. I was so bummed! He kept bringing small children onto the stage and then coaching them through some small-scale trick and then coaching the audience to loudly applaud them so that they could feel like real magicians. I complied, but, I mean, I have spent the past 18 years of my life loudly applauding children performing middling feats of adequacy--I really don't need to also have to do it for strange children in my free time. Especially not when I knew that I was supposed to be watching a full-on original musical production, and it was supposed to be one of my favorite things about the day! Seriously, I kid you not when I tell you that I bring up one or other of the past Holiday World shows in some capacity several times a year; they are EPIC AND I LOVE THEM.

Like an inside joke, these are probably nearly unwatchable if you weren't there at the time, but I have to share them anyway. I will be the first to admit that the actors are not always perfectly on pitch, but that just means that they're singing live, and on whatever random day we happened to visit, at whatever random showtime of the many they had that day, they were absolutely singing and dancing their hearts out. They were all extremely well-rehearsed, and their sincerity and enthusiasm shown through.

Here's the 2019 show, an original jukebox musical with a fun plot and tons of magic tricks:

The 2021 show was less well-crafted, and an unbiased eye would objectively call it bad, but in my VERY biased opinion, it cycled right back around from awful to AMAZING. Some of the song choices were hilariously off-topic (Midwestern boy singing Bruno Mars with 1000% camp enthusiasm? That's me sitting fourth row center, beaming at him and clapping enthusiastically!), and the circus components kept getting more and more ridiculously over-the-top (they don't do it in this video, but when we watched it live, at the end of the opening number some actors came rolling out on top of giant balls like circus bears of yore, and I burst into silent but hysterical laughter and did not stop until twenty minutes after the curtain dropped), but I kid you not when I tell you that I had not enjoyed myself so much since before March 2020. 

I think I've mentioned before how much I love outsider art--art, that is, that isn't "professional," isn't studied, isn't, perhaps, polished, but IS nevertheless skilled, sincere, and fresh. I love fanfiction, fan art, folk art, all the lovingly handcrafted bits and bobs on etsy, and, apparently, large-cast productions at local amusement parks.

Also, super randomly, there's a diving pool and they do a diving stunt show several times a day? YOU CANNOT NOT GO TO THE DIVING STUNT SHOW IT IS AWESOME.

The Associated Media

Obviously something isn't fun unless you study for it, so on the drive to Holiday World we listen to episodes from their official podcast:

"The One with the Cat's Meow" was surprising, because they randomly got one of the founders of Meow Wolf as a guest? I LOVE Meow Wolf, so I was stoked. Will and I went to a similar immersive art experience in Columbus, Ohio, so now all I need to do now is plan a trip to Denver, Las Vegas, or Santa Fe!

On the way home that night, I remembered that one of my favorite This American Life episodes revolves around a theme park, so I streamed it for us. My favorite segment from the episode isn't so much about theme parks, but about what is clearly the kindest, most inspiring, and most skilled boss probably anyone has had the privilege to work for. 

Okay, I just looked him up, and he has his own website! Looks like he's got a public speaking side hustle, and I say more power to him--if he ever motivationally spoke at an event I attended, I bet anything he would be the first motivational speaker I ever found motivational. Way better than the guy at a Girl Scout all-day thing a few years ago who advised us to let cars cut in front of us because life is too short. Like, Sir. I am a woman. If I let everyone who wanted to cut in front of me cut in front of me, I would never get there.

When the kids were a little younger, I'd sometimes do a theme park physics unit with them around the time of our yearly visit to Holiday World. I'd introduce them to the always amazing Rollercoaster Tycoon, or I'd have them build paper coasters, or sometimes we'd just watch some of these Disney Science of Imagineering videos. It was a little weird not to turn this year's trip into a homeschool lesson!

You know how the mommy bloggers' favorite summertime guilt trip is saying that you only get eighteen summers with your children before they're grown, so MAKE EVERY SECOND COUNT DO NOT REST UNTIL MAGIC PERMEATES EVERY MEMORY? Well, that yearly trip to Holiday World was the final hurrah of Will's eighteenth summer. I'm lucky enough to get one more fall and half a winter with her, still, as she's not heading off to college until January, but the bittersweetness is already there. She won't be selling Girl Scout cookies this winter. We don't even know what adventures she'll be having next summer, or whether they'll include a trip to her favorite little Southern Indiana theme park with her old mum. 

I hope they will. I mean, she only managed to ride The Voyage twice this time, so she's got some catching up to do!