Spring break is just winding down for me, and having skipped out on a week of tennis and U classes I might as well procrastinate getting back into my real life by writing about it.
Me and the family flew out to Alexandria, Virginia, to visit my older brother, his wife and two year old.
Vacations are getting to be worse and worse – instead of our usual laid back trips to montana by car, now that I’m an uncle and my parents have a grandson we have to get out east a time or two every year – and boy is it fun to be out east.
Both my brother and his wife have ph.d’s in chemistry, he works for the patent office and she heads the chemistry department at a $32,000 boarding school. She worked almost the whole time we were there, because this is her first year and she has to plan lessons and do all the coursework herself, not to mention correct all the kids work.
The kid was great, he’s just getting to an age where I can tolerate him. I’m not a big fan of babies, but I can handle a two year old. He loves to play trains, which turned out to be a game best realized by me pulling him around the yard in a sled. Soccer was fun – but he doesn’t quite have the kicking thing down yet, and sees balls as something to pick up and throw.
The vacation was packed full of stuff, except for the evenings when the kid wasn’t at daycare and the parents weren’t working we were always off doing something, mostly because what else can tourists do? We saw ten museums in D.C. I’m guessing, coupled with a monumental trek up and down the entire mall in just a few hours.
After a few days we trekked by car up to New York, stayed a night in a Jersey City hotel1 and saw all kinds of stuff there. There is something about New York – I hated the city, it just seemed dirty and crowded and dark and grimy, but you have to appreciate the scale of the place and all the sweet stores and restaurants there are. My Cousin lives in the east village and we met up at a sweet Russian place on 2nd av and 8th street (?) for dinner. Some real good food, we stayed for a real long time to catch up and then walked back up ten or twenty blocks to the subway to the path and out hotel.
I think my favorite part of the trip had to be the day after we came back and took a nice drive through Shenandoah National Park, and hiked a few hours along the appalachian trail. It was a beautiful day, probably 70 degrees, sunny, and just great. There weren’t many people, the only woman we saw was actually hiking the entire trail, solo, which rocked. She had her iPod with her, and said she bought new AA’s to power her supplementary charger. She said it was the only thing that kept her sane.
So the next morning we got to play with the boy for a few hours and headed out to the airport a little before lunch, ate on the way, turned in the rental car, and waited for the place at the airport.
It sucks that all my pictures are still on a computer in Alexandria, the crummy ass windows computer froze and locked up incredibly hard as trying to burn, I had to restart it, and then we were locked out and Kim was teaching a class so we couldn’t bug her for the password. I’ll get them sometime though.
1 It was a sweet hotel, we had two suites, each with two rooms, the nicest hotel beds I’ve ever slept in, just two blocks from a PATH train into Manhattan (Newark station I think) and the cost rooms cost just $56 each! And did I mention, 11th floor? (google maps is so cool, here it is)
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