Anniversary, exploring downtown Hastings, and a movie

Wednesday 6/6/2012

Hastings Campground

Hastings, NE

Today, Wednesday, June 6th, is our 31st wedding anniversary.  Terri has done a pretty good job of putting up with me all these years.  I truly have been blessed to have such a sweet, loving, compassionate, beautiful, caring wife throughout all of these years of blissful marriage.

To celebrate, we drove up to Grand Island, NE, and had lunch at Red Lobster.  I took the camera, but was so focused on the Cheddar Bay Biscuits I completely forgot to take pictures.  Terri had a garden salad, shrimp scampi, fried scallops, and mashed potatoes, and I had a garden salad and the Cajun Chicken Linguini Alfredo.  Of course we both enjoyed the biscuits.  Let’s just say I had less than seven.  To finish up our enjoyable time at Red Lobster, our waitress, Nicole, brought us a doggie bag full of biscuits to take home with us.  Needless to say, she got a nice tip today.

Yesterday we decided to head to downtown Hastings and check out the area.   We had driven down there a couple of other times and noticed a number of sculptures along the street that we wanted to check out.  Here are a few examples.

Only one sculpture had a descriptive plaque.

We both really liked this one with the dogs and cat.

Near the east end of downtown is a small park called Dutton-Lainson Plaza.

This sculpture is located there.

Across the street is the Dutton-Lainson Company with this beautiful clock on the side of the building.

The clock still works and had the correct time.  Here’s something I thought was a bit nostalgic.

Gems like these can be found all across the country if you just take time to look around.  The highlight of our downtown trek was a stop at Eileen’s Colossal Cookies.  This company was actually started in 1982 in Hastings and now has franchise locations in six states.

This place was recommended by Terri’s physical therapist, Ryan.  Terri chose an M&M cookie, and I chose a chocolate chip cookie.

Needless to say, we thoroughly enjoyed our cookies.

They were so good that we decided to buy a five pack of day old peanut butter cookies to take home with us.

Hastings has about twenty city parks.  We decided to go to Lake Hastings Park to sit and relax a while by the lake.

The park is very peaceful, except when the trains race by on the other side of the road.  There’s a nice bike/walking path that runs through the park and continues all the way downtown.  We sat here for quite a while and then headed home.

Later, we headed back downtown to the Rivoli Theater for an afternoon matinee movie.  This movie theater was built in 1926 and is still in very good condition.

It was nice to go to a traditional “movie house” instead of the new ultra-modern types that are taking over the industry.  As a bonus, Tuesday is free popcorn day!

The movie we went to see was Snow White and the Huntsman. 

This movie is definitely NOT for youngsters!  This movie is a fairytale/sci-fi/horror film.  It had quite a cast of characters including the evil witch, the king, the princess, warriors, dwarfs, fairies, and even a not so jolly troll.  Before the movie started a couple of women came into the theater with a couple of young girls.  After the movie, we both wondered if those two little girls will have nightmares now.  We both enjoyed the movie and thought it was an interesting alternative version of the fairytale.

It’s nice to finally start getting out and doing some things again.  We’ve been staying quite inactive per doctor’s orders and also because we didn’t have our car with us.  But now Terri is starting to feel better and we have the car back, so stay tuned for more exploring, discovery, and fun.