Category: travel

California trip – day 5 – Napa Valley

After a quick bagel breakfast we set off for our first wine tasting of the day at Elizabeth Spencer Winery. The tasting room is situated in the old town post office and Marshall greeted us warmly and led us through a wonderful tasting of a Sauvignon Blanc, two chardonnays, a Pinot Noir and two Cabernet Sauvignons. Jeremy and I confirmed our previous belief that these are some crazy tasty wines and decided to join their wine club (which also allowed us to get a discount on a few bottles to take back with us). We asked for some recommendations for lunch and were told that Farmstead and Cook were two good options so we made reservations for dinner at Cook (after validating the selection on Yelp and Urbanspoon) and headed to Farmstead for an early lunch. We were also given two discount tasting coupons for a nearby winery that (we later found out) Marshall used to work at so that winery was added to the list of destinations for the day.

Lunch at Farmstead was delicious. I had a country ham-wrapped fig salad with arugula and goat cheese and Mom and I split a burger with fried egg, with a side of fried potatoes. I think the fig salad is one of the best dishes from the whole trip, everything was so fresh and just tasted like it “should.” We noticed the tasting room next door (affiliated with the restaurant) had a Foursquare special for free tastings so we walked next door and tasted three wines and two olive oils at Long Meadow Ranch.

Grapes at Cakebread Cellars

Our next stop was Cakebread Cellars and we were given the VIP treatment thanks to some connections with friends back in Williamsburg. We were given a personal tour, tasted probably a dozen great wines, and even tasted grapes off of the vines so we could contrast the same grape being grown in the California and European-style of growing and trellising grapes (they really do taste different!).

Our last wine tasting stop was at Steltzner Vineyards (where our wine server Marshall at Elizabeth Spencer had worked previously). The bartender there also worked in the kitchen of Bottega, which had been another restaurant we wanted to try, so he checked to see if there were any openings coming up, and unfortunately there were not, will just have to be a place to go next time.

Before dinner we wandered around downtown St. Helena, perused two of the many olive oil stores, checked out the real estate listing (very pricey, but hey, you could buy a vineyard!) and then headed to dinner at Cook at 5:30. To start, we split the calamari and mussels with tomato and sausage appetizers amongst the table. Jeremy had the fetuccini carbonara special, Dad had the short ribs (recommended by Foursquare), Mom had a whole trout, and I had the risotto special with seared tuna, red grapes, and a pistachio, fig and bacon tapenade (very different combination of flavors, but tasty). For dessert I tried their “mundae,” chocolate and vanilla gelato with a balsamic reduction, gray sea salt, and extra virgin olive oil. Overall the flavors were good but the chilled olive oil was a bit odd, could’ve done without that but I guess we were in olive oil country.

After a rather harrowing drive back up the hill in the rain we made it back to the house and Jeremy and I decided to “rough it” a bit and sleep in the little garden cottage for the night. It’s really cute and cosy inside. Tomorrow we head down to San Francisco, possibly stopping at a winery, and then definitely going down the Pacific Coast Highway to the city.

Photos from our winery tours and of the AirBnB house are in a Flickr set if you’d like to see more.

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California trip – day 4 – Santa Rosa and our AirBnB house in Napa

So today was a travel day. We made our way out of Yosemite after cleaning up and checking out of Sunset House and traveled via route 140 and 580 through Modesto to Santa Rosa, California. We were running about two hours ahead of when we needed to check in to the next AirBnB spot (the Secluded Wine Country Retreat) so we

Bacon and brown sugar cupcake from Sift

utilized Foursquare to find a fun spot to grab a snack and kill some time. The first stop was Sift, a cupcakery, in downtown Santa Rosa. The four of us each got a different cupcake, carrot cake, lemon, Boston creme and cheesecake, and I got a bacon and brown sugar cupcake to go (bacon! cupcake!). All of the cupcakes were extremely tasty, and rightly so as the bakers there won Food Network’s Cupcake Wars back in early 2010, so that was definitely a fun discovery. We killed a bit of time at a nearby Barnes & Noble and then headed up the mountain to our “Secluded Napa Valley Retreat.” we were met at the house by the owner, a very friendly guy named Matt and we were shown around the cabin, which is fabulously and eclectically decorated with objects ranging from animal skulls (with little labels telling visitors what each animal it belonged to) to billiard and gazing balls, to Roman helmets and awesome star lamps and lanterns. There’s a cute little garden “room” outside (that is a converted shed) with a bed in it, Jeremy and I may sleep in there tomorrow night just for fun, tonight it’s raining though so we will stay in the second bedroom tonight.

A welcome tray from our AirBnB host, Matt

We were left with a welcome basket with wine, cheese, meat and some sparkling water so that was a really nice surprise. During our introductory tour Matt showed us a game of digital 20 questions that we played for a bit before dinner (Jeremy managed to stump the computer with “corkscrew”, it managed to guess “grape”, “billiard ball” and “candelabra”).

Jeremy and I cooked up pasta with a fresh tomato sauce, chicken and prosciutto. The kitchen is fully stocked with just about every size bowl and utensil (including an incredibly large whisk, no idea what you would use it for) so it was fun making dinner. We enjoyed a few bottles of wine through the course of the night as well (only appropriate being in wine country).

Tomorrow we have tastings scheduled at Cakebread Cellars and Elizabeth Spencer, so those should be a lot of fun. Hopefully the rain that’s been going all day will let up and we can get a chance to enjoy the deck here at the cabin. As we are all still kind of functioning on East coast time 9pm is feeling pretty late so I think it’s time to head to bed.

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California trip – day 3 – Yosemite, Mist Trail and Vernal Falls

Today started off early again with everyone heading out around 7am to get to the Yosemite stables by 8am. As usual, we got there significantly early (about 30 minutes), but better early than late. There were fifteen people all together in the group, with three guides. After watching a 15 year old “training video” warning us of the dangers of horseback riding by a narrator who sounded like he was out of an old western, we were told “enjoy the ride, partner” and were ready to head out.

Lenny the mule

We lined up and were each assigned a mule. Dad got a mule named Guiness (very appropriate considering his fondness for the beer of the same name), Jeremy’s was brown with a white mane named Uno, Mom’s was named Hawkeye, and mine was Lenny. We had a few couples as well as two families along for the ride, with a guide at the front, middle, and back of our single file line. The mules can walk this trail without virtually no guidance so you were just along for the ride more or less unless you decided to let them have a snack on a nearby bush.

We rode for about two hours, passed by Mirror Lake (which was more of a small pond at this time of year), and turned around at a spot where there was a rockslide in 2009 that closed off the trail loop. We doubled back a little and then went down some pretty rocky terrain, good thing the mules are sure footed. Both my mule and Mom’s we quite cautious, pausing at the top of any particularly steep spot for a few moments and figuring out the best way to go. After two hours we headed back to the stables, everyone was a bit stiff from the ride but overall we had a really great time and it’s definitely something we will have stories from and remember as a highlight of the trip.

We ate lunch out of the back of the car, making deli sandwiches and roughing it with no knives (Mom and I learned from the guys that you can just “rub the two pieces of bread together to spread the mustard around”…riiiight). After lunch we decided to split up, Mom and Dad opted to go around via the shuttle bus to the various gift shops and to see the historic lodges in the valley. Jeremy and I decided to go for a short(ish) hike via Mist Trailto see Vernal Falls.

Vernal Falls with a beautiful rainbow

The trail was listed as “moderate” in our guidebook (on a scale of easy, moderate, strenuous or very strenuous), and I hate to see what gets classified as strenuous. Granted the first half of the trail, which was quite popular and had the full gamut of age range hiking it, was a paved path but it went up quite steeply. I have decided it’s a very good thing to have a camera with you on these kinds of hikes as I would just “stop to take a picture” whenever I needed to catch my breath. The altitude definitely came into play here, it wasn’t that I needed to stop because my muscles were tired, it was just that I couldn’t catch my breath. Eventually though we got to the midway point where most folks turned around and just got a distant view of the falls, we decided to continue up the seemingly endless granite steps to finish the trail in pursuit of a better view. Every few hundred yards you would get an ever closer view of the falls, which had the light hitting them just right that there were rainbows at the base of the falls. The water comes over a sheer rock wall so the view is breathtaking seeing the water coming over, and the water rushing around all the huge boulders that have come off the wall over time. Granted, this was the lowest the falls had been all season, so I can’t imagine what it looks like at full capacity in the spring after the snow melt.

One of our avian visitors

We made it to the top of the falls and then walked back a bit to the Emerald Pool that feeds it for a snack stop. We sat in the shade on a big boulder and almost immediately after pulling out our granola bars we had peaked the attention of the surrounding birds and squirrels. A few were quite bold and landed or walked within a few feet of us, making for some fun wildlife photos but we eventually shooed them off. There were huge smooth slightly sloping rocks that in spring must be under a few feet of rushing water but, being we were there at the end of the season, were dry and offered a very comfortable spot to recline for a bit and soak up some sun and listen to the rushing water. We saw glimpses of a wooden bridge and an even higher waterfall, Nevada Falls, so I suggested we walk up a bit farther to try and get a better view and set that as the pinnacle of our hike. We made it up to the top, took a few more photos and then made the significantly faster journey downhill back to the shuttle stop to meet up with my folks.

We swung through the store to pick up a tri-tip steak to grill along with some corn, sweet potatoes and rice for dinner, and we will eat the bit of leftover chili as well to round out the meal. It has been a great stay in Yosemite, not too hurried, not too slow. I feel like we have seen a lot of the “famous” landmarks but managed to avoid really feeling like you were in a tourist spot, I think the photo walk and trail ride helped with that. Tomorrow we have a 5ish hour drive to Napa. On the way we will probably stop in Modesto for lunch somewhere (we will see what Yelp recommends), and be in Napa at our next AirBnB home between 4 and 5pm.

If you’d like to take a look, all of my Yosemite photos are up on Flickr.

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California trip – day 2 – Yosemite and Mariposa Grove

So today started off early (in California time, late on East coast) at 6am so that we could be at the Ansel Adams gallery in Yosemite valley a bit before 8:30am. It had taken us an hour to get to the house from the visitors center the day before but we forgot to add in the fact that downhill goes faster so we arrived almost 45 minutes early for our photo walk. We grabbed a cup of coffee at the little cafe at the visitors center and waited with the 11 other folks for the walk to start.

Reflections of Yosemite

We were led by one of the park photographers on an hour and a half mini-class. He explained aperture and shutter speed as well as ISO and how that affects your photos. We had a pretty diverse group both geographically and in terms of photography experience. There was a couple from the UK who had lots of nice equipment (the husband kindly offered to let me borrow an extra tripod when we were taking long-exposure shots), a few ladies from Minnesota with point and shoots, a lady from New Zealand with what appeared to be the same amount of equipment/experience as us except she had brought a tripod, and a few other folks with point-and-shoots. In hindsight, I wish we had stopped by the Swem Media Center at William & Mary and rented monopods to use for the trip, oh well, note for next time.

Our first stop after our camera “orientation” was to shoot an elm tree in one of the valley meadows in the morning sun. This was the first time in a long time that I had actually shot full manual, and I realized how much I do miss it. Shooting manual makes you really stop and take a bit more time to compose your shot, and playing with F-stops and histograms to adjust the light (even when your light meter says it’s “right”). We walked by the Merced river to shoot reflections of the huge granite formations next, and finished with some shots of Half Dome before heading back towards the visitors center and concluding the tour.

We walked around the gift shop and Adams Gallery for a bit then hopped on the (free!) hybrid shuttle bus that runs around the valley and went to the stables to see if there were any spots open for a horseback ride the next morning, and we were in luck! So tomorrow at 9am (we need to arrive at 8) we will be doing a 2 hour horseback tour of the park (Mom has always want to do this and I am super excited too 🙂 ). After making the reservations we got back on the shuttle and headed back to the main parking area. We decided earlier in the morning we would visit the Mariposa Grove in the afternoon so we stopped at a picnic area along the way to enjoy our peanut butter and strawberry jam sandwiches and then (after a bit of driving around to secure a parking spot) got on another shuttle up to the grove.

See those tiny colored dots on the road at the bottom center of the photo? That's my parents and Jeremy, these trees are HUGE!

The initial plan had been (based on the guidebooks we had) to ride a open air tram up to the upper grove, then to walk down and see all of the famous trees. Unfortunately the tram did not go just one way, and it was $26 per person, so we decided to walk. The lower grove (about a 1.5 mile hike) had a few famous trees, but the upper grove (an additional 2.5 mile hike) showcased some of the larger and more unique trees so once we got to the top of the lower grove we decided we were in good enough shape to visit the upper grove as well. There was quite a bit of uphill on the way to the little museum at the top of the upper grove but we made it, saw everything we wanted to, and were back down to the parking lot by 5pm.

The giant sequoias here are just unbelievably huge, it’s hard to really fathom how large they are until you standing next to them and realizing you could stretch your arms wide around the tree and not even go a tenth of the way around it. It’s amazing how these trees survive, and thrive, from the forest fires that occur every few years. The burned trunks create beautiful patterns and sometimes the fires hollow out entire trees, yet the trees are still alive (like the Telescope Tree). These guys are very resilient, and they aren’t even considered “mature” until they are 800 years old, some of the trees we saw were over 3000, amazing.

After hiking the grove we were all pretty famished and ready to head back to the house so we did just that. We cooked marinated pork chops on the grill with oven roasted potatoes and acorn squash, all the while enjoying a spectacular sunset view from our deck. So now it is quarter past 8 but since we are getting up early again I think we are all heading to bed early as well. Tomorrow we have the horseback ride in the morning then I think my folks will split up from Jeremy and I and we will do a short day hike somewhere while my parents visit the lodges and other shops in the valley, looking forward to all of it 🙂

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California Trip – day 0 and 1 – Travel to Yosemite

Our flight from Richmond left at 1:30 in the afternoon on Thursday so both Jeremy and I took off the whole day. We spent the morning running last minute errands before heading to the airport early to meet up with a friend who sold me her scooter (a Yamaha Vino) so we could exchange payment and the title. My parents were flying out of Dulles and it just happened to work out (no really, not planned) that our connecting flight to San Francisco was through Dulles on the same flight. We all were lucky enough to fly first class courtesy of miles and upgrades so we had a pretty relaxing cross-country flight. We landed in San Francisco (hello first time on the West coast!) around 7:30 PST, grabbed our bags from baggage claim and headed to a nearby Hilton for the night.

After our complementary hotel breakfast we set out towards the east and Yosemite National Park. Typically this is about a 4.5 hour drive but we stopped in Oakdale to pick up groceries for the next three days (breakfast, packable lunches and dinner) and to have lunch at a local deli called Ferrareses Deli that came highly recommended on both TripAdvisor and Yelp. I had a very tasty avocado BLT, Mom had the pesto chicken sandwich and Jeremy and Dad both had the French Dip, yum.

Most of the trip we just spent looking out at the scenery, as it changed from tan dry grass hillsides with wind farms, to seemingly endless groves of pecan trees, then finally to tall pine and cedar trees as we entered the national forest and ultimately Yosemite National Park.

We are staying in the only private residential section allowed in the park (courtesy of AirBnB, the Yosemite Sunset House), about an hour’s drive (15 miles) from the main visitor’s center in Yosemite Valley. We couldn’t check in until 5pm so we decided to head to the visitor’s center to pick up maps, standard souvenirs (I always buy photo magnets from places I visit, my mom always gets one of the 8×10 photo tour books), and to see if there was anything we wanted to make reservations for while we were in the park. The Ansel Adams gallery hosts 1.5 hour morning walks for free most mornings so we called and were able to reserve spots to take that tour in the morning. We are also talking about doing w horseback trail ride, hopefully we can fit that in, I haven’t ridden a horse for probably 18 years but it would be fun to do again, so we will see.

(from left to right) El Capital, Half Dome and the Three Brothers

On our way to the visitors center we passed by many of the park’s most famous sites, Bridal Veil falls, El Capitan, Half Dome, it’s amazing to see these in person, the views almost don’t look real, the scale of everything is just awesome.

We arrived at our house around 5:30, lugged all our suitcases up the three flights of outside stairs to be greeted by a pine tree studded view of the mountains and the sunset on our big deck. The house is situated on a hillside, with three separate apartments, the bottom is not open to the public, then there is a one bedroom apartment on the second level (the folks staying there pulled in around 8pm tonight) and then the top level is a 2 bedroom, one bath place where we are staying. There is a big open living/dining/kitchen area with lots of windows looking out to the forest and facing west towards the setting sun (thus the name “Sunset House”). We bought the makings for chili and cornbread at the store so we got that going and then sat out on the deck, enjoying the cool mountain air and views. Dinner turned out quite tasty (even with some baking dish improvising for the corn bread). Now everyone is getting ready to turn in for the night (we are all still on East coast time, luckily this works in our favor when we need to be at the visitors center tomorrow before 8:30am and we have an hour and change drive to get there).

So tomorrow, photo walk and tips on how to take “nature photos,” then I think a short day hike of some sort is in order. There’s so much to see, and we have two full days to see it, but for now, as it feels like 11:35pm rather than 8:35, I think it’s time to head to bed.

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July 4th holiday in CT and NYC – day 3

For our last day in NYC we decided to take advantage of our hotel’s close proximity to the New York Public Library and tour the famous building with all of its gorgeous architecture. They are celebrating their 100th anniversary so there was an exhibition of cool items from their collection, including a Guttenberg Bible, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, and a first edition copy of the music for the Star Spangled Banner. We went through and took photos of the famous reading room (and amusingly found Emily Post’s book on wedding etiquette which we perused for a few minutes). We went down to the children’s room and saw the original Winnie the Pooh stuffed animals (my favorite is Tigger) and then went next door to Bryant Park to sit outside for a few minutes and relax for a few minutes before heading down to Greenwich Village for our food tour.

So this tour I found out about kind of randomly. I had posted on Twitter that I was going to be in NYC for a few days and was looking for non-standard-tourist things to do. I got a reply from @ohmygola (a new travel recommendation website) asking for a bit more detail about the trip. Before I replied I checked out their website to make sure things we legit and not spam and looked around their existing New York City recommendations, it was there I came upon the Foods of NYC Tours Greenwich Village Food and Culture Walking Tour. I explored their site, checked out a few competitors, but this tour seemed by far the most interesting so I booked tickets for Jeremy and I for the afternoon tour. @ohmygola also formatted my reply tweet to them on their site and I got a response as well, so that was pretty cool.

Ok so we met in front of Murray’s Cheese Shop on Bleecker Street (although we did not taste stuff from them until later) and met our tour guide Bert who handed out water bottles and some coupons for the businesses we’d be visiting on the tour, here’s where we went via photos

Joe's Pizza, for a slice of "true and authentic" New York-style pizza (meaning, crushed tomato sauce, cheese, foldable crust made with NYC tap water)

O&CO for an olive oil tasting and a nutella-like spread made from olive oil and cocoa, yum!

 

Our tour guide Bert heading to get our next batch of food samples

Arancini from Faicco's Italian Specialties

We then went down into the Cornelia Street Cafe basement where many a famous performer (and performance) have gotten there start

Stuffed mushroom, truffle deviled egg, and bacon-wrapped, gorgonzola stuffed date from Centro Vinoteca. Jeremy and I also enjoyed a quartino of wine gifted to us by two ladies in the group who heard about our recent engagement.

Sweet and spicy salami from Faicco's

*amazing* chocolate chip cookies from Milk & Cookies Bakery, wonderful texture plus it was warm and fresh from their oven

The entertaining staff at Murray's Cheese Shop, where we got an olive, cheese, and cheese pastry sampling.

We ended with a light ricotta dessert specially made for the tour from Scali Caffé

Overall this was a fantastic tour, as we went between the different food places we stopped at cool buildings in Greenwich village, had a bunch of amazing sounding restaurants pointed out to us (essentially anywhere on Bleecker Street is a fantastic place to eat). After the tour we asked Bert for a recommendation for a place to kill an hour or so before we had to head back to the hotel and pick up our stuff to go to the airport, he recommended the Olive Tree Cafe where we enjoyed a great pitcher of sangria and tried not to plan wedding stuff 😉

The trip back to Norfolk was (thankfully) uneventful and we got back to Williamsburg around midnight, concluding a fantastic and (unexpectedly) memorable trip 🙂

Photos: NYPL and Food Tour Flickr Set

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July 4th holiday in CT and NYC – day 2, part 2

So fireworks in NYC on the Fourth are quite impressive 😉 We hopped on the subway and heded towards dinner at Spice Market around 7pm. We were a bit off on our estimation of how long the subway ride would take so we were a few minutes late for our 7:30 reservation time but we had to wait for our table a bit anyway so it wasn’t an issue. Rather than trying to choose from their menu Jeremy and I both opted for their nine-dish/four-course tasting menu and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc (decided to not be touristy and take photos this time around but here’s the breakdown per course):

Course 1

  • Shaved tuna with coconut milk, chili tapioca, pear and lime
  • Lobster summer roll with citrus-dill gelee and sriracha emulsion (was very different with the dill, a new flavor combo, but tasty)
  • Poppadum with spicy/smoky tomato salsa

Course 2

  • Pork sausage satay with lime and Thai basil dip (my favorite dish of the night)
  • Spiced chicken samosas with cilantro yogurt

Course 3

  • Ginger fried rice with a panko-crusted fried egg
  • Cod with Malaysian chile sauce, Thai basil and celery
  • Chargrilled chicken with kumquat lemongrass dressing

Course 4

  • Thai jewels (little flavored gelatin balls) with crushed coconut ice
  • Ovaltine kulfi (like an ice cream) with caramelized banana, spiced milk chocolate sauce and whipped cream

Fireworks from 12th street

Everything was served “family style” and overall things were very good (and reasonably priced for a tasting menu at $48 per person). Once we were done with dinner it was about 9:30, the fireworks had started at 9:20 but we had chosen the restaurant for it’s proximity to the fireworks (and ability to make a reservation on OpenTable) so we walked towards the water to be met with a probably 50-75 person-deep crowd at 13th street. We opted to go down a street for a better view upriver and enjoyed the rest of the fireworks from there with 1000s of others 🙂 We were able to see all 6 displays, just not the water below them, nevertheless they were quite impressive.

The fireworks concluded a bit before 10pm and we joined the masses heading to the subway stations and made our way back to the hotel after a lovely evening.

Photos: MoMA and NYC Fireworks Flickr Set

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July 4th holiday in CT and NYC – day 2, part 1

So our first full day in New York (as an engaged couple!) started off with a complementary and tasty breakfast in the hotel in their library/dining area. It’s really a great place to come in the morning, lots of windows, tasty coffee, quiet music, so a nice and low-key ways to start off the day.

I had never been to the Museum of Modern Art so we decided that would be our destination for the day. We left the hotel around 9:30, but the museum didn’t open until 10:30 so we opted to walk there to kill some time. We stopped by Rockefeller Plaza, looked around the Lego store (they didn’t have any good girl-with-glasses Lego heads otherwise I totally would’ve come out of there with a mini Lego-me), along with Cole Hahn (where the sales guy followed us around the store the whole time, a bit disconcerting), and Banana Republic (this was by far the largest store I’d ever been in) before heading to the museum.

If you have never been to MoMA, it is huge! And plan to spend pretty much the entire day there. We started on the top (6th) floor and worked our way down through famous paintings like Van Gough’s “Starry Night”, and Monet’s huge “Water Lilly” paintings along with more eclectic video art pieces, an exhibition on fonts and consumer design (they even had a Vespa), and even an exhibit on “serious video games” used for military training.

We stopped at the third floor around 1pm for a lunch break (as long as you keep your ticket you can come in and out all day). We were thwarted at the first place we picked (Burger Joint, was highly recommended on Yelp and Foursquare but was totally packed), so we went across the street to Angelo’s Pizza (also courtesy of some social media outlet). At Angelo’s we enjoyed a fried zucchini and eggplant appetizer (the veggies were cut into chips and deep fried then arranged in an orderly circular tower, really good and excellent crispy texture with just enough flavor from both the batter, salt and the veggies) served with a garlic yogurt, then we split a “small” (aka 14″) coal oven-baked prosciutto and basil pizza.

Now we are killing a bit of time before dinner reservations at Spice Market at 7:30 and then finding some clear river view of the Hudson for the fireworks at 9:20, should be fun 🙂

Photos: MoMA and NYC Fireworks Flickr Set

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July 4th holiday in CT and NYC – day 1, part 2

So not long after posting that last post there we’re a few new developments 😉 Jeremy and I were sitting in our room at the Library Hotel trying to decide what to do for the evening, I decided to look online to see if there were any Broadway shows that had tickets available and Jeremy was rummaging around in his bag. He says to me “I have a better idea.”, I turn around and he is holding a gorgeous platinum diamond ring! “Will you marry me?” he asked, and after a few stunned seconds I said “Yes!” and we kissed and smiled and did all that cute stuff and then both sat amazed on the bed for a few moments letting everything sink in.

Then of course the phone calls to all the parents and friends commenced, followed by a photo of the ring to put up on the various social media outlets with a caption of “I said yes!” to make the announcement, and of course the prerequisite relationship status change on Facebook to “engaged” (we are computer geeks after all).

At our friend Jim’s recommendation we went out to celebrate with champagne at a champagne bar called Flute. We each enjoyed a trio tasting of champagnes (mine were all roses, Jeremy’s were different varietals), truffle salted fries and a fruit and cheese plate, followed by another tasty glass of champagne each.

After finishing our champagne we headed to the rooftop bar of our hotel, which was closed since it was Sunday, but offered fun night views, especially since it was a bit foggy, and we both took some photos before heading back to the room for the evening.

P.S. Thanks for all the congrats via Facebook, Twitter and SMS 🙂 we are super excited, but have vowed to try and just enjoy the engagementness of it all for at least a month before going into wedding-planning mode. Seeing as both of us are uber planners we’ll see how well that works out 😉

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July 4th holiday in CT and NYC – day 2, part 1

This morning started earlier than most (for a vacation day anyway), we got up around 7:30 so that we could be ready to head into the city by 9 or so. We took the Merritt Parkway in towards the city, which is a much prettier drive than taking the interstates, even though the speed limit is lower. A cool tidbit about that road is that each one of the dozens of overpasses is a unique design, different carvings or railings decorate each one, so it makes for a more interesting drive. We hit a bit of traffic once we got on Long Island but made it to our hotel, The Library Hotel, around 11:30. Our room, the medicine room (all the rooms are organized by the Dewey decimal system), was ready early so we were able to drop our bags off before heading towards Times Square and the Discovery building to see the Pompeii exhibit.

We walked from the parking deck where Eileen left her car (for a lovely $21 fee, gotta love parking in the city) to the ever-busy Times Square, it was lightly raining so we got to maneuver our umbrellas amongst the crowd as well as dodge all the amazed tourists. Our tickets for Discovery’s Pompeii exhibit were at 1pm so we had about half an hour to kill before heading in and decided to stop at the Starlight Deli for a quick sandwich and chips to tide us over until dinner. Jeremy and I split a chicken BLT wrap and a bag of Dirty brand pesto Parmesan potato chips (the chips were…interesting, pretty much like eating crispy pesto, so a bit too strong of a flavor for me but couldn’t pass up at least trying them).

At the Discovery building there was also a Harry Potter exhibition which is where probably 80% of the people were actually going to (from the door it looked like it was a lot of the props and costumes from the films) but there were still a fair number of people heading into the Pompeii exhibit as well. We were ushered in in small groups, watched a quick introductory film on Pompeii and what it was like before Vesuvius erupted and then the screens opened up and you walked into the exhibit area which was broken up into two parts. The first part was all about the frescos and statues that were preserved by the eruption it was amazing the color and detail that was maintained despite the fact that these paintings and sculptures were nearly 2,000 years old. You then were taken into a second film room, this one with big speakers and subwoofers on the floor, and you got to “see” (via a CG recreation) what the eruption was like. Once the destruction was complete the doors opened onto the most intriguing and sad part of the collection, the body casts of the victims of the eruption. Some of the most famous casts were there, the dog, a family of four, a man crouched with his knees up against his, it’s amazing the level of detail that was preserved by the ash, it makes what happened so much more real and personal, you can see the folds of people’s clothes, and can almost make out the expression on their faces when the heat wave from the eruption overtook them. After the casts were all the various other artifacts that were preserved from daily life in 79AD, loaves of bread, combs and mirrors, pots and pans, jewelry (some arm bands that were still on bodies found at the site), everything you would expect to see in a thriving town that was quickly fled. Overall it was a very interesting exhibit, and fun to see more of the artifacts after having visited Pompeii itself twice (as many of the artifacts were obviously removed from their original spot so they could be preserved).

Once we left the exhibit area it was about 2pm and we decided to have an early dinner at Sophia’s Italian restaurant near Times Square. Each if us had a glass of the house red, Jeremy had tortillini, Eileen and I both had variations on veal scaloppini, quite tasty. After the meal Eileen decided to head back to Connecticut so we said our goodbyes and Jeremy and I headed back to the hotel. The Library offers a Foursquare special for all of its guests, on their first checkin you get a complementary bottle of wine! I love places that embrace social media (and NYC in particular embraces Foursquare as it was born here). We are enjoying the free wifi now, catching up on reading and email (and obviously blog posting), and plan to head out later and find a wine bar or the like, so more to come 🙂

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