Still on the road

Oliver is ready to get out of the car and luna's sleeping pills are wearing off but we are having a fine time.  We are some where in western PA and hoping to make it into Ohio tonight.  So far no snow just rain.

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On the road!!

T minus one week and counting

Well gang, our year-long adventure in New York is coming to a close. We officially have one more week left. Here's a rundown of that week, I'll do my best to ramp up on the blog and keep the dream alive for a little while longer.

• Monday - Wednesday: Packing, packing, packing!
• Thursday: Movers come and haul our stuff away
• Thursday - Sunday: We move to Manhattan. We are staying there because I have access to an apartment with a couple of beds. We are staying through Sunday because the boys' last piano recital is Sunday.
• Monday: We drop Kebs off at JFK, and we hit the road!!

We plan on cramming as much as possible in these last few days. Post a comment if you can think of anything we absolutely must see or do before we leave!

DC

Another blog from Kristal! So it won't be nearly as informative as Andrew's blogs.
On Nov. 5th we took a quick trip down to DC. By the time we got out of the house and fought though 4 hours of traffic to get to DC we had only a few hours of daylight left.

Here are the boys and I in front of the capitol building.


Andrew checking directions to the Monuments. We thought we had a great parking spot but it turned out we were over a mile away from everything we wanted to see.

The Washington Monument looking like it was so close! Yet it was so far!


The guys standing in the WWII Memorial.



Damion and Miles found their favorite state.


Miles was trying to make it look like he was holding the Washington Monument.

Our visit fell the day after Barack Obama won the election. This was a giant letter to him. It was at the base of the Lincoln Memorial.

At the Lincoln Memorial.








Miles took this picture of us chilling on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.


You wouldn't believe how many shots it took to finally get us all in the shot!


Obama's new house!!


Andrew will be back soon to do an update of our following adventures!!

Happy Birthday Kristal

Kristal's birthday was this past Saturday. We had a full day of fun.

First, Kristal woke up to this on the kitchen table:


Kristal was very anxious to get after the gifts, but we made her wait until after Miles' Famous Pancake Breakfast (I made some bacon to go along).


We got one last parting shot of the gifts...


Then let Kris dig in!





No, I didn't give her a box of Tylenol:


I had to hide some product I bought her in a box so she wouldn't get wise... :-)

After breakfast and gifts, we lounged around the house for a while, then got ready to go to a family concert at Carnegie Hall. It was called Berstein Beat, and was hosted by Leonard Berstein's daughter. They played a lot of music from West Side Story. The boys loved it!




We all had a great time.

We drove home, and had a couple more hours to kill, then Kristal and I got dressed up to go to Le Cirque, a really fancy and famous restaurant in New York City. It's one of the few restaurants I've ever been do that had a dress code -- jackets required for gentlemen.



Picking things off the menu wasn't easy. Being French, we had our choice of the usual things: Escargot, Foi Gras, frog legs, etc etc. for appetizers. We settled in on shrimp for Kristal, and I had a special, off-menu item, risotto with white truffle shaved table-side. He brought our appetizers out, and indeed, shaved a grand amount of white truffle onto my risotto. It was great!

We then moved on to main courses, which, I'll just summarize -- were disappointing. Nearly every choice was fatty and Kristal's pork dish was very fatty. I ordered a duck confit, which I've been on a kick of, but it was all modern and "deconstructed" and frankly, not as good as on-bone duck confit I've had lately.

Kristal had creme brulee for desert, and I had a chocolate mousse. Overall, the food was ok, not great. But the service in the place was unreal. So many waitstaff, bustling around, clearing this, bringing that...it was amazing.

Despite all Le Cirque had to offer, I nearly had a heart attack when the bill came. I was literally sick to my stomach most of the night afterwards. I paid more in tip than it costs me to feed my whole family at some places. It was a great and memory-filled birthday for Kristal, though, and we couldn't have rung in her 30th with anything better.

Halloween

Happy Halloween everyone! We had a very scary day!

But let's back up. This Halloween was a lesson in urban living. It was eye-opening because of how different it was. For example, in Portland we always go to Sauvie Island to the pumpkin patch. I should say, one of many pumpkin patches -- vast expanses of pumpkins you can pick yourself. There's none of that out here. Even out in the far reaches of Long Island (The Hamptons) the only thing there are vast expanses of are million dollars homes, and marsh.

Secondly, what would you do with a carved pumpkin if not put it out on your front porch or walkway? We don't have one, we, like everyone in this city, live in buildings. We debated whether we should even carve them at all, since I didn't really want the smell of raw, carved pumpkin filling our living room. We decided, in the end, to go ahead and carve pumpkins the night before Halloween, and put them outside our door just for Halloween day.








With pumpkins carved, Halloween day arrived. This morning, we got the boys dressed up in their costumes:


On the left, Miles, we have an Alien. On the right, Damion, we have General Grevous (from Star Wars).




Let's not forget about our other little boy!


Oliver was extremely embarrassed in his costume, and basically hid away on the couch while he had it on. LOL

The boys had a Halloween parade at school today, so Kristal and I dressed up in our costumes and went to the parade:



Here's the boys at their parade:



See the Alien in there? :-)


General Grevous!

After school, we learned another lesson of Halloween here. Like I mentioned, everybody lives in buildings. There aren't any houses. So there really isn't trick or treating. At least, no neighborhood trick or treating. What happens here is that most of the shops on the main strip through town, Washington St., have candy and the kids trick or treat there. Hoboken has a pretty fun Halloween parade, and there were TONS of people there.

Us getting ready for the Halloween parade:

This doesn't really do it justice, but there were thousands of people out, trick or treating on Washington.


Here's Kris, Damion, and Miles rocking it:


Those bags are getting full!!

Me with the dog:


The costumed dachshund doesn't really add to the level of METAL I was going for:


And last but not least, what would a Halloween parade be without an Elvis impersonator:


Stay tuned, we got Kristal's birthday tomorrow which will most certainly lead to some epic blogging!!