Upcoming adventures

For a while there, it seemed like we were getting caught in a rut. It probably has a lot to do with the weather - when we lived in California, we could always have adventures even in the middle of winter, and now suddenly we were in the midst a genuine cold-weather-snow-on-the-ground-cloudy-skies-just-want-to-snuggle-on-the-couch New England winter. Not that we got any epic amounts of snow this winter, despite all the blizzards that hit the East coast. Nearly ever single one missed us. The weather people were constantly predicting lots of snow and we would only get a dusting or a measly couple of inches while my parents in South Jersey were being buried under a foot of snow. Yes, I'm a little bitter about that. I love blizzards! I just wanted one good one, since it had been two years since I lived somewhere that would actually get snow and there's something just so magical about a good snowstorm. Just wait: now that things are warming up and I've given up on getting a good snowstorm and I'm looking forward to spring, we'll get walloped by a huge blizzard but I won't be able to enjoy it because it's freaking MARCH. Springtime blizzards are lame. Unless it's a storm so epic that it shuts down Raytheon and James and I get a snow day. Then it would be okay.

Anyway. After we got back from our California Christmastime trip, we turned into big time home bodies. We worked around the house and watched TV and movies and played with our Wii and only really went out for errands. After two months of it, I started feeling antsy and a little glum that we didn't have any adventures to look forward to. And suddenly, all sorts of plans are materializing and new opportunities are presenting themselves. (Also, it helps to look at the whole year's worth of adventures rather than just the immediate future.) Now that spring is arriving, we can emerge from hibernation at last, yippee!

James' Birthday: James' birthday is this coming Monday (March 15), so this weekend I'll be making him a birthday dinner. It'll be a molasses-bourbon ham, a dish that he loves that I've only made twice before since it's kind of a special-occasion meal. I'm not sure yet what else we'll have with it, other than the cake: he's requested spiceless spice cake. I'm fairly certain that this will turn into a huge production.

New York City: In honor of James' birthday, we'll be going down to NYC next weekend (March 19-21). He wanted to go down for my birthday in October, but I decided I'd rather have a New Hampshire getaway weekend, so that's what we did. Now we're feeling overdue for a New York adventure, and celebrating James' birthday seems like the perfect reason. We're planning on visiting a lot of museums: the Met and the National History Museum, to be sure, and probably also the MoMa, and maybe even the Guggenheim. But that's probably overly ambitious for one weekend, and I feel like we might burn out on art overload, so I'm not counting on making it to the Guggenheim on this trip. We'd also like to take in a musical, though we have yet to decide which one. Possibly Avenue Q? It seems like all of my friends in college saw it and loved it, and I have yet to see it. James had never heard of it, but I think he'd like it. We're also hoping to meet up with my dear friend Caitlin, who lives in Brooklyn. It's been ages since we've seen her. (I wish Alison and Saul still lived in NYC! *pout*)

Easter: My parents are planning on coming up to visit us for a long weekend around Easter, which is April 4th. I'm still not sure how long their visit will be, but it'll be so good to see them again - we haven't seen them since Thanksgiving. We're looking forward to putting my parents to work (hehehe): we have our old toilet and old oven out in the back yard because we can't leave them at the curb for trash collection, so we'd like to use their van to haul them off to the dump. We've been stalling because of winter and also the fact that we'd have to rent a truck to do it ourselves. Add to that the inevitable fee the dump will charge us, and we weren't really to motivated to deal with it. But now that spring is coming and we'll be using our backyard again, it'll be nice to get it cleaned up. Also, we're hoping my dad will help us "mud" the office. We have the drywall up, and my dad plastered the seams and drill holes for about half of the room when they visited in the summer. We finished drywalling after they left but didn't attempt any of the plastering. My dad's an expert at it so it makes sense to wait til he's here. I'm looking forward to cooking them lots of good food when they're here! I don't feel like we've made a ton of progress on the house since they were here in August, but hopefully they'll be pleased with what we have done.

Florida: This week we got a very unexpected surprise: James has to go to Orlando next month for work. It's not officially official yet, but it looks 99.999% certain. James' work thing is Monday, April 26. James immediately thought that we should make a trip of it, so we're planning on flying down the Friday before and flying back on Tuesday. Our plan is to see Cape Canaveral on Friday, then Disney World on Saturday and Sunday. I am SO. EXCITED. to be going back to Disney World. James has never been, and after we went to Disneyland together last year, I was hoping that we'd be able to go to Disney World together, but I didn't really think it would be possible, at least not in the near future. But with work paying for James' flight down and the hotel room for at least one night, it seems like it'll be a pretty good deal. The only downer is James' work thing seems to be all day Monday, and I can't go because I'm not invited, so I'm not sure what I'll be doing. One possibility is that I could visit family friends who live in Tampa, which is 1 1/2 hours from Orlando. The husband was a reader at our wedding. They're retired so most likely they'd be available for a visit.

Anniversary: Wow, it's hard to believe, but our wedding anniversary will be coming up not long after we get back from Florida. We don't have anything special planned just yet, but I imagine a nice dinner will be in order. Maybe dinner down in Boston? Maybe an overnight in Boston, with some sightseeing and a fancy dinner? OO THAT SOUNDS AWESOME.

Camping: This is mostly a vague notion, but sometime this summer I'd like to go camping for a long weekend. My idea was to meet my parents at Sturbridge Village/Wells State Park, which is just over an hour away from us. My family camped there in the mid-to-late Nineties, or there abouts, and I really liked it there. We camped at the state park and either spent our days hiking through the park or visiting the village, which is a "living museum." The village is made of early 19th century buildings and all the employees dress in 1830s-style clothing and actually "live" in the village (at least during business hours) as people would have lived back then. There's a blacksmith making horseshoes and a cobbler making shoes and a cooper making barrels and you can go in the houses and talk with the women baking bread and it's just such a neat experience. So I'm hoping we can go for a long weekend sometime in June or July. I think it'd be a lot of fun.

New England Day Trips: I'm hoping that once the weather turns nice, we can make lots of day trip adventures exploring our part of New England. There's an awful lot to see and do. This is going to probably sound really geeky, but: Tropicana has a deal right now where you enter codes from under the cap (we get single-serving bottles of OJ at lunch fairly regularly) online to collect points, which you can redeem for lots of things. One thing we can redeem it for: tickets for museums, like two caps will get us buy-one-get-one free admission to the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston. One cap will get us the same deal at the Lowell Textiles Museum (our area used to be home to a big booming textiles industry). There's a deal for the house where Louisa May Alcott grew up, along with other historical museum-houses in the Boston area. I'm thinking we'll be using those points to get into a lot of area museums for cheap this spring and summer. There's also exploring Lexington and Concord, or Cambridge, the John Adams house, walking the rest of the Freedom trail...

Montreal: While watching the Olympics in Vancouver this past February, we decided to pull up Canada on Google maps and see how far away it actually is. I'm used to thinking of Canada as being a 16 hour drive away, since that's how long it took my high school marching band to drive from my hometown to Toronto back in the day. I'm sure James feels the same way: Canada is just far away. It's not someplace we can easily visit. Well, lo and behold Montreal is only five hours north of us. We immediately decided to visit sometime this summer. James has never been out of the country, and I've heard lovely things about Montreal, so we're pretty excited. This will probably happen in August, and the length of time depends on how much vacation time we'll have.

Hawaii: OMG you guys, we're planning a trip to Hawaii. For the fall, because that's when Hawaii gets the nicest weather and also it's off-season so hotels and flights should be less expensive. (High tourist season is in the summer and around Christmas.) We're saving up whatever we can for it, and it's exciting to watch our Hawaii fund slowly growing. I have no idea how long it'll be or what we'll see or even what islands we want to visit, but none of that really matters right now because WE'RE GOING TO HAWAII.

Arroyo Grande: Since we spent Thanksgiving with my family and Christmas with his family last year, we're reversing it this year. We're planning on taking the whole week of Thanksgiving off to spend it with James' family in AG, on the central coast of California. It's amazingly beautiful there, and I can't wait to go back. Plus, his family is fabulous and it really stinks that they all live on the opposite coast, so getting to see them is extremely good. Two great things about this trip, from a practical standpoint: one: we get Thursday and Friday as holidays, so we only have to use three days of vacation time. Two: we get to use our free round-trip tickets that we got when we volunteered to be bumped the last time we went out to California, and since we'll be staying with his parents, it'll be a very low-cost trip.

Christmas: We'll be spending Christmas with my family, but the location has yet to be determined. It may be in Pennsylvania, it may be in New Jersey. Hopefully my sister and brother-in-law will be able to come home for the holidays. It's just not the same if they're not there.

Italy: This one is pretty far off, but I'm still looking forward to it big time. We're saving up a bit every month for a trip to Italy. It won't be happening in 2010, but next year is a possibility, though 2012 might be more likely. As with Hawaii, we might be doing this during the off-season to save money and avoid the crush of tourists. I think that would put it in the January-March time period, but who knows. I'd like to go to Tuscany and Rome, I'm not sure where James would like to go. I really really want to go to Florence though, because I absolutely fell in love with that city when I visited it for a summer study abroad trip in college.

Paris: A girl can dream, right? Maybe someday...