Action Packed Weekend

I had the best weekend I’ve had in a long time!

Saturday after work my friend and I went to the Long Grove Strawberry Fest. It’s always extremely crowded but the strawberry donuts and the BBQ are worth pushing through the crowds of sweaty people. The Strawberry Salsa is always amazing and now that the Galena Canning Company has a website I can have it year-round. I’m not normally a fan of sweet and spicy things combined but they have mastered the combination in all of their products. The Pumpkin Butter and Key Lime Hot Sauce are amazing as well.

#36. Eat a deep friend candy bar – CHECK!

More importantly I tried my very first deep fried Snickers at one of the stands. I love Snickers and I love fried food so obviously it was a match made in heaven. And luckily I can’t get my hands on one of those babies too often or I’d be headed straight for a heart attack. Although, 2 seconds after sharing it with my friend I think we both felt like we needed to go for a run asap.

#35. Touch a Starfish – CHECK!

After recovering from my heat stroke (kidding!) and over-indulging in strawberryness Saturday I headed to the Shedd Aquarium with my boyfriend on Sunday. It was nice to spend the date with him. This was our first “date” in a long time. We work entirely too much to do much more than watch a movie on demand most of the time. I love the Shedd. I always enjoy the different exhibits. The last time I went they had the big lizard exhibit with the Kimodo Dragon. This year they had sharks. Very cool. They even had an area where you could reach your hands into a shallow pond-like habitat to touch a real, live starfish. Now, I’ve touched starfish on the beach as a kid a few times but I’ll try it whenever I get the chance, they are such interesting creatures.

#40. Touch a Pengiun – CHECK!

The highlight of it all was my “Pengiun Encounter”. Apparently this is a new thing they are trying out and only a handful of people get to do it every day and they sell out very quickly. Basically they take you into an area with a trainer, a photographer, and a few other people and they let the Megallenic Penguin roam around while everyone is seated on benches. Our pengiuns name was “407”…apparently they don’t give them real names due to the large numbers of animals. She was pretty cute – she was a year and a few months so she didn’t look like an adult pengiun as far as coloration goes but she was the same size. She would just walk up to you and stare you right into the eyes…check out your shoe laces or in my case my frayed jeans and then waddle onto the next person. And I have to say pengiuns to do not feel anything like what I had imagined. Their coat (if you can call it that) feels like feathers…I was imagining an oily, matt coat. It was worth the $20 and I would recommend it to anyone who has the chance to check it out. Next time I’ll be doing the Beluga Whale one…

After I’d bought a few too many shot glasses (3…hey! it’s on my list…) we headed over to the Taste of Chicago. It just never gets old, I could go every single year. This year they only had local restaurants. (They used to have places from the suburbs as well.) I tried some Hibiscus flavored ice cream which was surprisingly good. Had some crab cake nuggets, an emapanada, some fried plantains…and the list goes on. So, needless to say I’ll be needing to do a little bit more than yoga for exercise for the next few weeks due to my large calorie intake.

It’s unfortunate that dressing up as a banana was not on my list because I definately did that with my friend and my picture is up on the Chiquita Banana website…who knew they ever had a website?! That was fun but we had a few too many guys taking pictures aside from the Chiquita guy…and my boyfriend looked a tad bit embarrassed I had a giant banana costume on. Oh well.

You only live once…my boyfriend can deal with it. 😉