The Dittrich's: October 2008

Hello Everyone,

I said when I started this blog that it was no guarantee how often I would be able to write on it, so I am terribly sorry that it has been so long. (Apologies especially to Aunt Erma who sent me a reminder to get back on this, lol) I am writing to you today as we are traveling on a train back into the city. We have had the great fortune of being able to enjoy a wonderful weekend (extended) outside of the city. We spent Friday until today (Tuesday) about an hour outside of the city. We traveled to St. Charles, IL via Metra train. This was a little of a surprise to Austin, he knew of the weekend and the plans, except one thing, I’ll get to that in a second, but I had arranged everything.

So… this is the time during our ‘fall break’. Our school has a ‘Missions Conference’ every year, where instead of classes Wed-Fri (morning) we have sessions that we have to attend. There are 1 hour sessions with separate individual speakers that you can choose which one you would like to go to out of probably about 50 or more different ones and then there are a few general sessions where everyone has to attend. Anyway… so then on Mon and Tues of the following week we get what are called ‘Study/Reading Days’ basically they want you to be caught up for the week after the break, but most students use this time off of school to take a vacation home or go somewhere with floor mates or something else.

So… we left the city Friday afternoon, after demolishing our apartment and packing on Friday morning to try to get ready and traveled on the train about an hour out to St. Charles. Friday, Sat, and Sun nights we stayed in the cheapest hotel we could find which happened to be a Days Inn a little outside of downtown St. Charles. It was an okay hotel and an okay room, nice King bed, I think that’s our favorite part of staying in hotels, lol, the nice big king bed compared to our Queen. Friday night we attended a conference called “Love & Respect”. We had read part of the books from the speaker, also called “Love & Respect”. It’s an amazing insight into relationships between the sexes. It’s obviously geared towards the marriage relationship, but it is a great communication tool for others in your family and to teach your children too. I highly recommend the book, especially for married people. Again, it’s called “Love and Respect and it’s by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs. The conference was Friday night and also Saturday afternoon, it was at a church called Wheaton Bible Church and we had met some great people, Darren and Pam, that agreed to give us rides to and from the church for the conference days and also on Sunday when we attended their regular Sunday morning service. It was an amazing blessing to us, as we soon realized that using taxi’s as a sole means of transportation, as they don’t have public transit, when traveling on average 2-6 miles gets quite expensive. We figured out that Darren probably saved us about $125 and then he even insisted on buying us lunch on Sunday which was WAY more than we ever could have asked for or wanted, but he wouldn’t let us pay! The church was amazing in and of its self. They have a huge campus. The church is three stories with three separate auditoriums. One for the main service, one for the Hispanic service and a completely separate auditorium for the high school youth. It was a beautiful, beautiful church.

Anyway, after the conference and church we just spent some good relaxation time in our hotel room and I got a bit of homework done and we even spent some time in the pool. We had some good dinners at; Olive Garden and TGIF and also a yummy lunch with Darren at a place called Sweet Tomatoes. It’s basically like a Ponderosa but instead of a full buffet it’s a salad buffet. They also have some homemade soups and breads and such. We were able to walk to our restaurants mostly, they were all within about a mile, so not too bad of a walk, thankfully the weather stayed pretty nice this weekend also, we didn’t get rained on or froze or anything.

Monday morning it was time to switch hotels, YAY! Well… so we thought. So after spending three nights in a regular, average, okay sort of hotel, oh yeah… with a lady bug infestation, we wanted to spend our final night in a nice, luxury sort of place. Yes, it was fairly expensive, as this whole weekend was, but we’ve been able to save up some and get a little ahead so that we decided we could afford to have a nice get away. So… we check out of our Days Inn hotel and walk down to the downtown area of St. Charles, about another mile, this time lugging along our luggage behind us, lol, we got some funny looks in this small, nice, town. Thankfully, the wife was smart enough to think of this and bring the rolling luggage instead of the duffel bag. We get to the hotel, which has a check in time of 4:00pm, our check-out was 11:00am, but the hotel was going to hold our luggage for us. Early check in was $25 but instead we decided to just drop our luggage off and spend a few hours at the mall, a mile past our original hotel, so now about 2 miles away. After dropping our luggage off at this amazing, beautiful hotel… we had only seen the lobby, but it was amazing. We went to the mall, by taxi, and spent a few hours there. We walked around, spent some time window shopping and walking around in the stores, no purchasing though and then went to see a movie. We saw “W.” it’s the movie about President Bush. It was decent, a little dry, definitely something I recommend seeing after it comes out on DVD, don’t go see it in the theater. Then we traveled back to Hotel Baker, via taxi.

So, a little info on Hotel Baker, it was built back in 1918 as a hotel by honorary (because of his racing horses, he was given the name) Colonel Edward Baker. He inherited 20 MILLION dollars from his sister, Dellora, who was an heiress to the Texaco Oil Company, when she passed away and he used over 1 million of that to make this beautiful hotel. The hotel is situated right on the Fox River. It literally is on the river, as you’ll see in some pictures. The hotel is created solely of brick and concrete which makes it very solidly constructed. The wish of Colonel Baker was that no two rooms be the same or even decorated the same, so he spent a lot of money decorating with pieces of furniture, rugs and ect from all over.

Well, after we got back, we checked in and went up to our room, beautiful elevators, beautiful hallways and I loved the doors to the rooms, you’ll see those in pictures too. BUT… we walk into our room and bam… it’s a small room, smaller than Days Inn, it’s average for any hotel room and decorated minimally with supposed antique furniture. Well, as you can guess this was less, much less, than expected for what we paid and for what we thought should be of this great, historic hotel. We sat in our room, both disappointed and me VERY discouraged on what to do. Do we just leave? Will they give us our money back, or even part of our money back? Should we find a different hotel? Should we cut our weekend short a day and just try to go back home? Grr… frustration was definitely setting in and my perfect weekend was coming to a screeching halt. Finally, we had made our decision, we’d tell them we weren’t satisfied and ask if we’d get our money back or at least a partial refund and see if we could find a cheap hotel room or decide to go back into the city. Well, when Austin called the front desk to tell them we were dissatisfied… they said they would show us another couple of rooms, a little nicer, and see if we might be interested in staying in one of them for the same price, as they weren’t busy at all. I think there may have only been one or two other rooms occupied, as it was a Monday night. So this nice manager named Melissa came and knocked on our door and took us down the hall to a ‘King with a parlor’. I wasn’t really all that impressed with this room either as it was basically our room, low quality furnishings and dingy, but with an added ‘room’ with a sofa in it. I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to switch to this room for the same price as I didn’t feel it was really worth the price either. She said, well I can show you another room, but I think it’s basically the same set up as your first and you may be dissatisfied with it also. She also mentioned how some people just didn’t like the feel of the refurbished, old hotel. We said, this wasn’t the issue, but just that we had expected a little more for our money and the quality just wasn’t there. I said it couldn’t hurt to see the other room, so she took us down the hall to the elevators and as we were waiting she said she’d make a call to the front desk to see if a different room was available. She called and then we went up one more floor to the 5^th floor. She took us to this room that was very similar to the 1^st and it was a definite no, so she took us to the last room that she had called the front desk about… It was a beautiful room that was about 3 times the size of our original reservation AND had a small balcony WITH a hot tub! We were completely shocked that they were even offering us this room as an option, as it was at least $100-$150 more than our original reservation. We told her this was so much more than we could have asked for or expected and we told her we were very appreciative and felt bad for accepting this but we would gladly take this room for the same price as our original reservation! So, we got our luggage, that was in poor shape by this time, our handle was not taking to the weight in the bag very well… and moved to the new room. My big excitement about this hotel, was that they had complimentary fluffy robes, I know, small, but exciting. To our dismay, this new room did not have any… lol. We were too embarrassed at that time to call the front desk after all they had just done for us.

We settled in, both still in shock and disbelief at this amazing opportunity and then decided to go out to dinner. We ate dinner right across the street at Szechwan Restaurant, a great little Chinese restaurant. We came back from our dinner and went back up to our room deciding to get to the hot tub and take advantage of that. At this time, we called to report our missing robes and promptly received two soft, fluffy warm terry cloth robes. We BOTH enjoyed them VERY much! So we spent two whole hours in the hot tub. It was great, just being able to relax and enjoy the view. We were on the 5^th floor as mentioned and our balcony overlooked the street down below and you could see part of the river. It was nice because even as we were sitting there in a busy little town, cars streaming by down below it seemed quite. We realized it was different because there were NO blaring car horns, very few sirens, I think we heard all of like two and it just seemed serene. So after our wonderful two hours in the hot tub we were both so relaxed and sleepy, we were ready to crawl into the most snuggly, warm, comfy King bed EVER! With nice soft Egyptian cotton sheets and pillow cases. Plus, even though the street lights shined up from the street below, there were amazing curtains that made the room totally dark. The most wonderful evening I can remember!

Neither one of us wanted to roll out of bed this morning, but we reluctantly got up so that we could eat a European Continental Breakfast. Yummy! I of course had to make a fool out of myself, of course it definitely could have been worse… So, it must be a European thing, but they had eggs (still in the shell, not scrambled or something of the sort)… I was excited, cuz as the Cunningham’s will know, hard boiled eggs are something that runs in the family. Well, I had eaten the majority of my breakfast and decided to have a crack at my egg… haha get it… anyway… I decided instead of using their nice soft nice cloth napkins, I’d grab a cocktail napkin from the breakfast bar and I opened it up and put my egg neatly inside so that I wouldn’t get egg shells everywhere. I go to roll it on the table to break the shell and crush it around the edges and to my surprise… IT’S NOT HARD BOILED, NOPE, NOT COOKED AT ALL! HA! So, thankfully I had my napkin around it and it didn’t get everywhere, but I felt pretty stupid. Especially when it’s so fancy and we’re eating on real plates and they come and clean your food for you, lol! After that we went to the front desk and asked about the ‘complimentary transportation’ and got a ride set up for check out time to take us back to the train station. Anyway, so we finished packing up and lay on our wonderful bed for about 15 minutes to soak it all in for the final time.

After this we went downstairs and this cute little old man was awaiting us to drive us to the train station. He was SO adorable and he gave us a wonderful historical, educational ride to the train station. We were talking about some of the recent growth in the town and he says to us… “After you’ve been here for 75 years you notice the changes”. He had lived in this little area his entire life and had even KNEW Colonel Baker himself. He spent a lot of time on the Colonel’s nieces' (she inherited the hotel after the Colonel died) property as he was growing up. He talked about her 9 hole golf course, her pool, her horses, her huge house and land. He was SO sweet, I just loved him. Anyway, so he was a great blessing to us also, educating us about the history of the town and about Colonel Baker’s other contributions to the town. We both really enjoyed the historical lessons. The town was adorable also in its sweet old townie feel with all its little shops and parks.

It was a wonderful weekend and I’m glad to share it with you all! Hope you enjoyed it!

P.S. Sorry there are SO MANY pictures on here. I just really wanted to share them all to give you an idea of where we were and the fun we had. Thanks for bearing with me in this...