This year was Jay's turn to pick. He did his research and went to the trusty Indiana Tourism website and uncovered what looked like a good call. Hammond, Indiana, where Jean Shelton the writer of A Christmas Story is from and based his stories on, was hosting A Christmas Story Festival in the downtown area. Jay thought it would be great to shorten my distance from Chicago on these trips. That was very thoughtful. He sent us all links to the website and we were all very excited.
On the day we met at the Hammond Visitors Station off of I94 & I80. There was a sign that it was going to be a good day. As we met in the parking lot we say Ara Parseghian get in a car and pull away. We went into the Visitors Center and it had A Christmas Story Gift shop as well as a bunch of Christmas Story displays. They looked like what you would find in the window of Macy's (See pictures below) This is exactly what we saw on the website and we were stoked. We all bought out the gift shop and then piled in the car to go to downtown Hammond for the festivities.
If this were a movie, this is where you would hear the record scratch sound effect. When we arrived at downtown Hammond it was a ghost town. There was nothing there except for one hot dog vendor, a turkey bowling station and a person in a bunny suite. Not the bunny pj's Ralphie wore but a bunny suite. The local bank had been abandoned and they decided to try and make it look like Higbee's from the movie. We looked around and got a picture taken with Santa and we were done at noon. So what were we going to do with the rest of the day? Now I had lived for four years in Valparaiso, Indiana and I knew of a great rip place up in Chesteron, so I suggested to my brothers we could either go to Munster and visit Three Floyds or we could go to Chesterton and eat Wagner's Ribs. They were up for the ribs.
The place did not disappoint. Just so you know Wagner's is a bar so no kids are allowed, but we had a great time talking about what a dud Hammond was and enjoying the ribs. Tom bought an extra jar of the sauce to take home. This trip although being bad was definitely one for the storybooks.
No comments:
Post a Comment