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.