East Coast Part II

Well, Erin and I are in Mexico right now, and there’s lots to say…but I’m back logged with this blog so here’s what I got so far:

All kinds of pics here:

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Fairmount Park in Philly is the nation’s largest contiguous park. Valley Green is one of my most favorite spots in all of Fairmount Park. Tuesday morning we woke up and went for a beautiful bike ride through Mt. Airy to Valley Green and all along the river to the art museum and back. The ride must have been 25 miles, and my butt was feeling it.

We had a fantastic picnic lunch along the river. Erin and I discovered that we really like sardines.

 

 

We couldn’t help re-enacting the scene from Rocky where he ran up the steps of the Art Museum.

 

VIDEO UP STAIRS

 

The next day Erin and I drove to the lovely Leisure Village West retirement community to visit my grandparents. I love the quote they have on their entrance sign, “It’s the time of your life to have the time of your life.” We started our day by taking my grandpa to get his new hearing aide. While he was with the doctor Erin and I took my grandma around the neighborhood and shot some hoops (I wish I had the video of that). We then had lunch at a terrible diner where all the people working there looked so burnt out.

 

 

New Jersey is an interesting place. It’s a cross between exquisite farmland and beaches mixed with strip malls with no sidewalks, wide and expansive roads with jug handle turns and almost as many seniors as Florida. We all had a wonderful day together. We played bocce ball and looked at pictures of my 6^th grade graduation, when I was pre-pubescent and chubby.

 

 

We ended the night driving back to Philly for one of my great friend’s, Shaggy, 29^th Birth Day party at a bar across from Eastern State Penitentiary, where he works with 150 other people operating the state prison as a haunted house. There were almost 40 people out at the bar and I knew most of them. The highlight of the night was seeing his dad, Gil.

 

(Purple cause Erin is writing) Let me tell you about one exquisite (to use Linda’s adjective) highlight of our trip: KAYAKING on the Delaware. Dave’s Moms, Linda and Amy are gnarly kayaking fiends. They are the perfect people to take us on a Pennsylvania adventure. We launched onto the wide and beautiful Delaware, Amy and Dave in fancy touring kayaks, Linda and I in supafly squirrelly river boats. The day was crisp and glittery. The clouds were puffy and intriguing. It was very peaceful. We hit some little ripple rapids, which were SO FUN. One of my favorite parts was turning around and watching the other’s expressions of delight, fear and excitement all rolled into one. The trip took all day, where we caught up with each others adventures, ate a gourmet lunch on a pebble strewn island and ended up at a Thai restaurant in town, where we almost ate the waiter’s arm when he joked with us that he had forgotten our meals.

 

 

The following Monday we hopped on a train to New York City. Our good friends, Bryan and Navah, hosted us for the first two days. Their apartment was gorgeous and comfortable…we are so grateful to their warm reception. We dropped our bags off and took the metro to Central Park. We spent the better part of our first day in the city at the Central Park Zoo. Although small, it was quite enjoyable and well done. Strolling through their rainforest got us excited for our foreign adventures.

 

 

We walked back to our temporary apartment and we all had Afghani food and drinks.

The next day we decided to go to a contemporary art museum in Queens. Sadly, I didn’t check that the museum was open, which it wasn’t, so called up some good friends who picked us up and took us back to their glorious apartment in Astoria, where we sat on their roof for the entire day enjoying the view and the unseasonably warm weather

 

 

 

We then all headed to the city to meet up with Bryan and Navah to have some Thai food. We sped through our delicious dinner to catch a unique and incredible show in Times Square, “Fuerza Brutta.” I couldn’t tell you what it was about, but the entire audience had no seats and we were all forced into a room where we constantly moved around, dodged water, actors and Styrofoam and spent the better part of the evening craning our necks to watch beautiful aerial performances. The highlight was a 40’ x 60’ transparent stage full of water being lowered on top of us with performers doing the slip and slide above.

 

 

On Wed we were fortunate and Bryan took the day to hang with us. We randomly bumped into an old friend, Justin Cina, from Carnegie Mellon in a coffee shop in the moring. But the better part of the day was spent walking around the Chelsea galleries and snubbing our noses up to the hoity toity people there.

 

 

We went to a sake bar happy hour and had some delicious drinks before leaving to meet many of my extended cousins from the Stern Family. We met at a fun restaurant called Cowgirl, where we had a table for 12. My great friend Jenny met up with us too. It was an absolute blast to see some familiar faces (Hayley, Sondra, Jesse and fiance Melissa, Kirin and Alison, Jenny, Bryan and Navah.

 

 

That night we stayed at Kirin and Alison’s brand spankin new loft in the West Village. They did a wonderful job fixing it up, no shocker there since Alison is an architect and interior designer. We got some great time seeing them and even went out to the ritzy meat packing district to hob knob with the classy New Yorkers. It wasn’t really our scene, especially when we saw that bottles of Vodka sold for $375. The next day we got a lovely tour of the upper West and East side with Alison. We did a lot of walking, and by the time we were ready to leave NYC we felt as though we really got a wonderful sense of the city. We were ready to go.

 

 

We hopped on a bus to Providence to meet up with my old college friend Meghan Tibbitts. I don’t think I had seen Meghan for about 4 years, so it was a real treat to see her, and meet her sister, Sarah, and boyfriend, Carlos. Sadly, as soon as we arrived I got the flu. For the next three days I had a serious temperature and aches and chills. That didn’t stop us from catching up and having fun, but we were much more relaxed and low key than planned. The best part of the visit was making Halloween costumes. The girls were Batman and the boys were Robin.

 

 

That night we went out to Providence to see the sights and were surprised to not see a single person dressed up. It was a bizarre and surreal experience being sick, dressed as Robin, and walking around the center of a happening town as the only masked crusaders.

 

 

The next morning we carved pumpkins and went for a walk around their neighborhood. We watched lots of movies and enjoyed seeing Boston sweep Colorado. An extra special treat was having brunch with Joe Vona, a father of Erin’s friend Andrea. We even got to see some of his amazing art.

 

 

We than said our goodbyes and got on a train back down the mid Atlantic corridor. Erin split off to visit her college friend, Elizabeth, and I went to meet up with my mom for a fancy dinner at the White Dog Café. The next morning my mom and me drove up to New Jersey to see my grandparents so they could rematch us in a cut throat game of Bocce Ball.

 

 

We picked up Erin and headed back to Philly. Halloween is my favorite holiday. Creating a costume was tons of fun, and I’m psyched that I had one to wear when Erin and I headed out to Eastern State Penitentiary’s Haunted House, where many friends were working to scare the crap out of people. What an experience. One thing to note about the prison, which no longer holds actually prisoners, is because most went insane because of the lack of windows. The place is very creepy. After waiting in line for 40 minutes, where I got to pose with the security guards, we entered the haunted house.

 

 

They did such a wonderful job. There were strobe lights, fog machines, black lights, puppets, 150 actors, and lots of screaming and surprises. I had fun, especially dressed up. The best part was being with Zach and meeting his new puppy, Sophia.

 

 

For our last week in Philly we took some time apart. Erin went to a Zen center called Mt Equity in upstate PA. I got some great time in with my family and friends. An extra bonus was seeing a group of friends from elementary school. We caught up and played games all night. The next day I picked up Erin at the bus station and we finished all of our last minute preparations. We had our last round of goodbyes to every one. The next day we had a teary goodbye with my mom and Amy and got on a plane to Mexico!