Spirit Halloween, Oscar's, Pulp, Ritter Park, Antiques, Murals, and more in Huntington

Yesterday was quite an eventful Saturday. Hive account@flowerbaby and I drove down to Huntington to spend the entire day. We ended up leaving my place earlier than expected, a bit after 11 am. The main reason we were going was for the biggest soccer match of the year, but more on the game in tomorrow's post. The game didn't start until 7:15 pm, so that gave us a huge amount of time to do other things. Other things we most certainly did.

The drive down was a little under an hour and we were not in a rush to get there since we had so much time to burn. Our first stop was Spirit Halloween, which is the most popular Halloween store around. Several of these stores usually pop up everywhere right around fall, but for some reason there, is only one somewhat nearby to us this year. Barboursville is the only Spirit Halloween story for us, but luckily the old Toys“R”Us building is very easy to get to. A Halloween store in an abandoned toy store sounds like a horror movie if you ask me. Speaking of that, there is a horror movie set inside of a Spirit Halloween store coming out next month.

No, nothing spooky happened while we were there. Although the inside was for sure dimly lit and anything could have happened. Instead of something horrifying occurring, Hive account@flowerbaby purchased three vintage Halloween masks to decorate the walls of her bedroom with. These were just plastic, so not super expensive, but the designs were really cool. She went with Frankenstein, a vampire, and the old-school black cat.

After we finished up at Spirit, it was off to Oscar's to have some lunch. We were both very hungry by this time and always look forward to eating at this place. The restaurant theme is a mix of Houston Astros gear/colors and heavy metal. You can find all sorts of memorabilia along the walls of this joint. Did I mention that the food is delicious? We shared a cup of chili since they didn't have potato soup. Then she got the Oscar burger with chips and I decided upon the Byzantine with Primate Fries, which is basically a Big Mac turned into french fries. We left totally stuffed and needed to walk off our calories to not feel so full.

We took a short trip to Gabe's, which is a discount store that usually always has something interesting. We actually didn't end up buying anything for once. This is a continued trend throughout the day. Basically, the only thing we spent money on was gas, food, and Halloween masks. That didn't stop us from having some fun looking at things every place we went.

After failing to shop at the first store we visited, we drove back up the road to our favorite smoothie shop called Pulp. I ordered one called The Pink Dragon, which was a mixture of dragonfruit, lemon, and mango. It was amazing. She got one called Anna Banana (they forget the H's to make it Hannah Banana). Her's was too sweet for me, but she liked it enough to drink more than half of it.

We ventured to Ritter Park afterward to kill some time. The weather was nice and there were plenty of people there enjoying themselves. We laid out this big outdoor blanket-like thing so we didn't have to play directly in the grass. I was ready for a nap and so was she, but neither of us would let ourselves fall asleep. After about half an hour out there, it started to rain a tiny bit and we rushed back to the car. The rain stopped quickly, but by that time the ground was already wet and we decided it was best to leave.

Our next destination was the West End of Huntington, which I now think of as Junkertown (Overwatch fans will recognize that name). There were so many antique thrift stores in this old area and that totally just isn't the place for me. Hive account@flowerbaby loves to look around places like this for little hidden gems, but this day we didn't find a thing.

We went back outside to the desolate little town and started walking a bit. Eventually, we stumbled upon a mural outside of The Wild Ramp. I insisted on taking some photos and I'm glad we did. I always appreciate a nice piece of artwork like this and am proud to capture photographs in front of it.

We hit up one more thrift mall called Huntington's Peddlers Mall and this place was just filled with useless stuff that people were hoping to sell. I didn't bite on any of it and only had to restrain Hive account@flowerbaby from wasting her money a handful of times. Okay maybe it was closer to a dozen times, but still, we ended up leaving empty-handed. Trust me when I say it was for the best.

We had one final destination before we went to the soccer game. I didn't want her to get hungry during the game, so we stopped at Midway for some hot dogs. I've always known of this place and the reviews on Google were 4.7 out of 5. Everybody seems to love it. I can say without a doubt, it is nothing special. The hot dogs weren't even grilled, instead just boiled and flavorless. The french fries were just frozen crinkle fries. It just wasn't very good. Luckily their prices were dirt cheap. I guess we should have known it would have been low quality because of that.

That's all we did before the game. If you want to hear about the soccer match, be sure to come back to my blog tomorrow. I will have plenty of photos from the game. Plus, it ended up being one of the most exciting ends of a soccer match that I have ever witnessed in person. If you are a fan of soccer (or football, whichever you call it), then you don't want to miss my post tomorrow. Be sure to give me a follow so you don't miss me on your feed.

Thanks for reading today and I hope you enjoy the photos that accompany this blog.