Troll Hunting Whimventure®

How does a Whimventure® start? What does it take to do something “On a whim?” Well to start off… not much. On Friday, Sue was finishing up a stressful week at work and we had discussed options for the weekend. Of course one of those options was to stay home and get things done around the house (the responsible ADULT thing to do). We knew that Thomas Dambo has just moved his traveling Troll Exhibit from Philadelphia to Nashville so we decided to head south and do some troll hunting. How long did it take? About 5 minutes. We knew the boys would be fine overnight, and all we needed was a change of clothes and (being adults) things like medications and a toothbrush. With a quick pack of our go bags we were on the road.

They say there is a season in the midwest called “Road Construction” and they aren’t kidding. In Indianapolis, currently one of the projects shuts down I-465 going south on the east side of town. Hmmm… guess where we needed to go? We did finally get on I-65 south and headed towards Nashville. We had thought about doing this in May, but Nashville hotel prices for that weekend were crazy expensive. This weekend, at least where we were looking were reasonable.

Always Complications & Maybe Some Beer.

“There are only four rules you need to remember: make the plan, execute the plan, expect the plan to go off the rails, throw away the plan.” – Leonard Snart. We pulled into Yazoo Brewing for dinner and enjoyed a beautiful view and nice food along with some pretty good IPAs. Unfortunately, when we got back to the car, we had a low tire warning light go off. Did I mention Road Construction is a season? The tire looked and acted fine and it was too late to do anything about it, so we headed back to the hotel. Fortunately? Sue had tire trouble in Nashville when she was at a convention and knew where to get it fixed. So we headed to Discount Tire in the morning.

Me, being anxious, had tire repair as my number one priority. They removed the nail, plugged the tire and we drove off to breakfast, getting a call that the tire place still had the cap for the wheel 🙄. Drove back and then headed off to the hotel, where I had left my wallet in the room 🙄🙄. You see how this day is going? Breakfast was nice, Sue wanted to stop at a franchise she deals with for work and play secret shopper. As we were there I tried to figure out how to reset the blasted tire sensor that still showed I had a low tire. Which I finally did reset on the way home. Today the low tire light came on again… 😱 I know what I’m doing tomorrow.

Finally, we get to Cheekwood Estates & Garden, current home of Thomas Dambo’s “Save the Humans” exhibit. We paid for entry and started to walk around the beautiful landscaped gardens, hunting for trolls. Where are all the trolls in the world? Check out Thomas’ Troll Map. We’ve now pretty much seen all the Trolls close by, but look forward to future trips and the trolls we will see along the way.

Having now become seasoned troll hunters we enjoyed not only the trolls but the other art and landscaping throughout Cheekwood.

We picked up the Trash Trolls and Treasure Hunts book, but unfortunately, they were out of t-shirts in any “normal old adult” sizes- no troll shirts for me. On our way out of town we stopped into Antique Archaeology home of the TV Show American Pickers… While nice it seemed to be mostly branded merch for the show and not as many actual antiques as I recall from my visit last fall. We left empty handed and headed home.

One of the nice things about being in Indianapolis is it is close to many places so going on a Whimventure® isn’t too hard. I’ve joked about driving to Chicago or Columbus, Ohio for a sandwich. As for my carbon footprint- I’d consider an electric car brother ways to get places if the infrastructure in the U.S. would better support it.