Dirty Dancing, ABBA, and Parasite Train Man

So this weekend was our world-famous, often imitated never duplicated, second annual Girls Trip to Chicago. Watch out, Windy City...here comes the 30 something mothers from Green Bay! We're pretty hardcore.

The weekend started off not so great. The plan was to leave from my house around noonish. All the girls got there, we hung out, laughed at Tate, and waited. And waited and waited and waited for Eric to call saying he was done at work. By 1:45 I decided waiting was for pansies and we all headed down to the designated meeting space in Manitowoc where Eric would drive the kids back up to Green Bay in our car and the four of us would continue on our journey. So we get to the gas station, I call Eric, and he's not done. Nowhere close to being done, funnily enough. Not so funny at the time, I promise you. So there's four women and two very confused, tired children stuffed into my van. We were making the best of it though and having a good time. Well, except for Nora. For some reason she thinks my friend Nicole is the Evil Incarnate, so everytime Nicole's head would pop over Nora's carseat to say hi, she would flip. Not that I can blame her. Who wants to see some giant disembodied head popping into view at random times with no warning?

This was us.

Notice Tate's look of confusion. He just has that air of a man desperate to get out of a car full of cackling women. Nicole's in the green coat. I gotta say, it is a scary head. Poor Nora.

So Eric's ride finally pulls up to the gas station and we all pile out of the van like clowns coming out of a miniature car. I gave him a kiss, waved bye bye to the kids and off we went to catch our train in Milwaukee. The original plan was to get the 3:00 train but that didn't work for obvious reasons. So we decided to hop on the 5 o'clock. We get to the Amtrak station at 4, skip inside, and realize the train isn't til 5:45. Perrrrfect. Can you blame me for mixing a little something something in with the Coke I bought from the vending machine?

Anyway. We get to the condo around 7:30, dump our crap and run back out for dinner since we're all so hungry we're about to start dining on each other. And you know what else we did that night? Nothing. We're so old and pathetic and the traveling and waiting wore us out so much we were giddy at the thought of just sitting on our asses in the condo and drinking. So we did. And we did a damn good job of it, too.

Saturday, though...we went to see Dirty Dancing! Live on stage! It was awesome! I totally screamed when Johnny Castle walked out on stage and I was the only one and I didn't care because he was totally hot and I was just waiting for him to take his shirt off and when he did it was totally awesome but he had an Australian accent that kept coming and going so it was weird but it really didn't matter because he had a 12-pack and then when he said "Nobody puts Baby in the corner I screamed again but it was ok because other people did too!!!!! The play was really good. It was the same as the movie, line for line, song for song, dance move for dance move. Cecilia and I did an extremely good job of refraining from reciting all the words along with the actors. Oh, and we managed not to jump in the aisle and do the lift at the end too. It's all about restraint.

Here's us outside the theater. A cop took the picture. Yes, we really are that cute. I love my leopard jacket...I was too preggo to wear it last winter so I'm totally rocking it this year even though it's about as warm as wearing Kleenex.

Oh, and since there were five of us on Saturday since Cecilia took the train in from her parents' house, this is what we looked like in the back of cabs.

That picture is of me on Jodi's lap, and Sue. It was taken by Nicole. She was in the backseat with

us. Cozy? Yes. Hot? Very much so. Smelly? Maybe just a little.

Saturday night Jodi and I took the novices back over to the Blue Frog for a little karaoke. This was the site of our stunning karaoke fail of August '08. We were determined to make a comeback and leave 'em wanting more. And we so did. We totally rocked Sweet Caroline and Dancing Queen. People were dancing in the aisles, yo. We were better than ABBA themselves. We weren't better than Neil, though. No one is better than Neil, but we knew that going in. We had backup dancers! I was doing that thing where you hold the microphone out to your audience during the chorus so they can sing back like we were playing to a house of 305,000 adoring fans! It was more like 50 adoring fans, but they adored the SHIT out of us. Success. August's karaoke experience needn't ever be spoken of again.

Then we came home at about 12:30 am. God, we are crazy. Who stays out that late?? I amaze myself with our party animal ways.

So the train ride home...we ended up sitting right by the bathroom. Let me just say right now that that was not ideal. What was really not ideal was having this creepy, pale, ucky looking guy slink into the bathroom FOUR times in a 90 minute trip. Oh, and each potty break lasted a good 10 minutes. The last one was a quadruple-flusher. Sue and I were lucky enough to be able to close enough to count the flushes, and also to realize that apparently this man didn't believe in washing his hands after shooting the entire contents of his bowels into a hole on a train. Gagging yet? Yeah, tell me about it. I'll spare you the explanation of the foul odor that would follow Poopy Man out of the bathroom each time. I swear it was like a green cloud that would just hover over us. Didn't help so much that he apparently couldn't figure out how to shut the door behind him when he left. GAH. I seriously think he had some kind of parasite eating a hole in his intestines or something. Which is always a really really fun thing to think about. I know my mom is reading this and throwing up in her mouth a little bit right now.

Anyway, aside from Foul Butt Man, the trip was another great time. Lots of sleep, lots of drinks, lots of laughs...doesn't get better. Next time we're taking the train cross-country to Seattle. It looked cool on the poster. That was good enough for us.