We hit rush hour traffic as we approached Indianapolis. We decided to stop for dinner to pass the time while traffic cleared up. I told Eddie since it was technically our last night, (we plan to get home tomorrow night) I wanted a fancy dinner. I hopped on yelp and found a place that had stellar reviews.

Of course the place I picked was dead smack in the center of downtown Indianapolis (on a Friday night). I have the tendency to pick fantastic restaurants that have ridiculous parking situations, as was the case tonight. We had to pull into a parking garage that just barely fit my truck. In order to access the restaurant, we had to take a ramp, an escalator, enter a hotel and exit out a back door and another escalator until we got to the entrance. Little did we know this was only one of many mazes we would have to navigate throughout the evening.

Dinner was fabulous. The yelp reviews were spot on and I plan to add mine to the mix as well. I may have mentioned to the hostess that we were on our honeymoon and we were provided top quality service. Our waiter, Alexander, took the time to go over menu options, highlighting the items they were well known for. Once Eddie and I each settled on the surf and turf, Alexander allowed us to customize it, Eddie’s with a larger steak and mine with a different topping.

Eddie started off with some oysters while I had a Caesar salad. His oysters were huge and came with a really good house-ground horseradish. My salad came with a giant piece of Asiago cheese on top, so it was pretty perfect. The homemade Caesar dressing was delicious.

The waiter came to clear our appetizer dishes and in place left us each a dish with a rolled up hot washcloth with a lemon on it. We stared at each other for a few minutes waiting to see what the other was going to do. After a brief stare off, we admitted that neither one of us knew what the heck to do! I immediately texted my sister and brother in law, but they took too long to respond. I poked my cloth with a fork to see if there was anything else in it. I finally decided to google it, and as I began, I caught Eddie squeezing the lemon on his hand and wiping his entire face with the hot cloth. Turns out, you’re supposed to squeeze the lemon on the hot cloth and use it to clean off your hands to get rid of the fishy smell left by raw seafood. We had a really good laugh about the whole thing!

Dinner arrived in a timely fashion and the presentation on the plate was beautiful. The cuts of meat were very thick. It’s very hard to prepare that shape of steak the way I like it. I prefer mine cooked medium-well, or as Eddie pronounces it, ruined. My steak was cooked perfectly. Eddie prefers to get his steak partially mooing and his was perfect as well. In fact, his was so tender and juicy he was able to cut it with a butter knife.

Alexander surprised us after dinner with a slice of cheesecake. This was no ordinary cheesecake. The top half of it was creme brûlée’d and had some blueberries and homemade blueberry sauce drizzled on it. At first bite, we both knew cheesecake had been ruined for life. The ONLY way to eat cheesecake should be if it’s half creme brûlée’d. Luckily this restaurant has another location in Cincinnati, OH which is only 10 1/2 hours away from home.

We left dinner with our bellies full and our hearts happy. To top it all off, traffic had cleared up! We got back on I-70 to continue our journey home.

At this point, I was driving and Eddie was navigating. He told me that I was about 20 minutes away from the border of Ohio and that there was heavy traffic. I immediately turned on Waze for assistance. After 30 painstakingly long minutes creeping at 2mph, we managed to get the 3/4 miles to the nearest exit. Before getting too far into waze’s directions, Eddie and I switched seats so I could do the navigating.

Waze had an awesome detour picked out for us, or so we thought. We knew we had to be doing the right thing because we had a car in front of us and another behind us. Waze’s detour was going great until she tried to put us back on a stretch of highway that was still closed due to the construction. We continued the follow the guy in front of us who was also following Waze to see if it would reroute us again. She did. The only problem was her new route involved turning around and going back into the 20 mile long traffic jam of tractor trailers.

I finally turned off Waze and began navigating using the map on my phone. With a giant almost-full moon above us, I proceeded to guide Eddie through back roads, dirt roads, cornfields and places where we thought for sure aliens or werewolves were going to pop out at any minute. Somehow I managed to get us out of Indiana and into Ohio and eventually back on I-70. It was definitely tense for a while, but we made it!

I’m not sure if we’re going to make it to our initial goal of Pennsylvania because we lost a lot of time in traffic and backroads. We might just end up staying somewhere in Ohio but I’ll keep you all posted.