Gingerbread Fun

Like most towns in America our downtown area was abandoned in the 70's and 80's and malls were built in the suburbs.  Over the last 15 - 20 years the city council has been trying to attract small business back to downtown.  One area has been pretty successful in the last 5 years and now hosts a whole variety of small shops and restaurants.  One of the businesses is a bakery that makes primarily fancy cakes.  The owner baked gingerbread houses and placed them in 25 - 30 of the shops and businesses on the street and set up a tour map for visitors to come and see them.  The baker decorated each house to look like the store that housed it.  My friend who is entertaining her foreign exchange student and his mother asked my daughter and me to join them for the afternoon and we toured the gingerbread houses.  

I took only a couple of photos, but we had a lot of fun visiting lots of shops and places I had never been in before.  Here are the few photos I took:

This house was at a shop that sells plants and supplies for hydroponic gardening.  Yep - grass on the roof.

Same house, just wanted a better photo of the snowman.

This one is shaped like a handbag for a trendy boutique.

This one is in a bank.  Those are gingerbread men at the front corners.  The initials BMO are on the roof.

A couple of the businesses no longer had their houses as they had been damaged.  When we entered one shop, we looked around for quite awhile and couldn't find the house.  I finally asked the owner where their house was and she sheepishly told me they ate it!!!!  I nearly died laughing.  She said they couldn't always get away to eat lunch, so they started eating the house one little piece at a time.  Ewww!!  Usually those things get so hard and yukky, I can't even imagine wanting to taste them.  I just could not stop telling this story to other people.  

After the tour, our husbands met us and we all went out for dinner at the local brewery.  This is my friend Joyce with her guests trying the local brew.  They also make a terrific root beer which is my drink of choice.