Hot Plate Special in Louisville

Ohio River and Lousiville, looking southeast from the Sheraton

Ohio River and Louisville, looking southeast from the Sheraton

I just got back from a trip to Louisville, Kentucky, where I stayed at the Sheraton Louisville Riverside Hotel* while attending a regional Unity conference, which I really enjoyed (Unity people are on average pretty awesome). Due to a potent combination of food sensitivities and food snobbery, I had decided prior to the trip that I would take my own food, and cook it while I was there. I also had decided on staying at the hotel instead of trying to find a local bed and breakfast, because of a bad experience I had at a B&B for last year’s conference in northern Indiana (and it was just a lot more convenient, being on site, which was important because I’m the admin assistant for the regional association). I made arrangements with the hotel to get a fridge in my room, which was free if it was for medical reasons, and they didn’t even require me to show a doctor’s note for it or anything.

Well, I’ll admit I felt really weird taking a hot plate to a nice hotel, and I’m plenty paranoid about using hot plates anyway, but it worked out surprisingly well. Yeah, it was a lot of work, what with cooking the food, cleaning up, washing dishes, etc, but I think part of the reason the week went so well for me was that almost all the food I ate was decent home cooked food with no weird stuff in it, which is not what you get even in nice hotels like the Sheraton Louisville. I took bacon, eggs from pasture-raised chickens, homemade gluten-free pancakes, plain organic yogurt, and blueberries for breakfast, and (previously slow-cooked) chuck roast, beef broth, and organic potatoes and organic sweet potatoes for lunch and dinner. I also brought plenty of butter to slather on the pancakes and potatoes. The hot plate was brand new and worked really well; it heated up quickly and maintained temperature well, although it did take quite awhile to cool down (not bad for an $18 hot plate). The little non-skid feet worked too well; they liked to stick to the stove mat (detaching from the hot plate) when I needed to move the hot plate after it had cooled down. (To be fair, a lot of stuff likes sticking to the stove mat, which is probably why they re-designed it.)

I still ate about five meals out, which is about 4-5 more than I usually eat out in a week, but I was careful (kept them gluten-free and relatively low-carb) and it all seemed to work out okay. I also didn’t gain weight – I’m very happy about that!

Other trip highlights:

The Louisville Science Center – when I paid for my admission, the clerk asked me if I wanted to donate $1 to science. I asked “What science?” and he paused for a moment, then laughed, and joked that it was for cloning – I guess he’s not used to getting asked that question. Turns out it was for the Science Center, which I was okay with. I watched three awesome IMAX movies – Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure, Sharks, and Lewis and Clark – the Great Journey West. I got freebies related to two of the movies, the best one being a poster map of the Lewis and Clark expedition. I had planned on checking out the center’s exhibits after the movies, even though they were all kid-oriented, but there were also several dozen kids there at the time, with some of them running around like they were high on sugar or something, and the rest of them were yelling. I seriously do not remember kids being so loud when I was a kid! I had to leave before my head exploded from all the noise.
Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory – I just went here because I had some time to kill and the hotel shuttle was going to be picking people up there. I paid $10 for a short tour of the manufacturing floor, and got my free little souvenir bat (no idea what I’m going to do with it!). The best part of this place was the intoxicating scent of fresh wood shavings (no wonder “woodsy accents” are so popular in perfumes and colognes). The second best part was all the prominent signage warning people that baseball bats are not allowed on planes except as checked luggage. Oh, and the 120 foot tall baseball bat out front was pretty cool.
The musician for the conference was Karl Anthony, who did a great job and provided a beautiful concert Tuesday evening at Unity of Louisville with cool laser lights and lots of audience-participation chanting. The huge dome of the sanctuary was perfect for the laser show! Karl certainly earned his paycheck; he had to be there for the entire conference, provide music in the morning to get everyone going, and for the evening events, plus the concert mentioned above.
I was given a beautiful necklace by one of the exhibitors, Dr. Steve McSwain, which apparently is a very popular necklace with Unity folks; he calls it the Unity Pendant. I love this necklace! I wore it all week.
The hotel staff were awesome; I had to pester them several times to make a few copies of important documents, get let back in my room after locking myself out, etc, and they were very accommodating. My room was clean, quiet, and comfortable, with a very nice view of the Ohio River (I was on the ninth floor). The banquet meal was decent, and the lunch I ate from the Bristol Bar and Grill was pretty good. Somewhere up the chain, though, someone had overbooked the hotel, so a lot of our members got moved to different rooms, and our meetings got moved around too, some at the last minute, because the Rutgers University football team was staying there for their game in Louisville, and apparently they outranked us. So we all got to see and marvel at the fuss involved in accommodating a Division I college football team – a lot! There were about 100-150 people there total (I heard differing numbers from otherwise reliable sources), and about 85 of them were actual football players (Rev. Ron quizzed one of the coaches; and thanks to Rev. Ron for any sports facts in this blog post, because I don’t know diddly about sports). For our last two days there, everywhere we went in the hotel, there was someone wearing red and black. Hey, Rutgers security guards – you didn’t think about people up in the tenth floor conference room spying on the team while they were practicing their offensive and defensive stuff down in the parking lot, did you? You’re lucky I didn’t take some video on my iPhone and post it on YouTube. I would have had to care about football, though, to do that, so lucky for you, I don’t. Congrats on your victory over Louisville.

Next year’s conference will be back at Potawatomi Inn in Pokagon State Park, Indiana, a lovely, clean, quiet place that serves mediocre food swimming in hydrogenated vegetable oils on its best days. I’ll sneak my hot plate in when I’m there next year, and I know I will be eating a lot better than just about everyone else in the hotel. Hopefully none of the guests will be beating my door down while I’m cooking bacon.

*actually, the hotel was in Jeffersonville, Indiana. But we were right on the river and we could see Louisville from the hotel, so I guess that counts as Louisville.

Divine Mind

musings by Angel