Cole's Graduation Weekendback

Hi!

Alex's cousin Cole, who lives in Philadelphia, graduated from Penn this month!  Alex's parents flew to Baltimore and we drove to Philly with them and had a great time!



On Sunday, Alex's aunt and uncle had a nice brunch at their house.  A lot of Cole's friends and their families from out of town came.







It was perfect weather to eat outside in their pretty backyard!





That evening we went to the ceremony for his specific college.





We took some pics with Cole after the ceremony.



The next morning we went to the school-wide ceremony, which was also really nice!  The speaker was Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.  She gave such a great speech!  





After the ceremony we had lunch with Cole, his girlfriend Jackie, Alex's parents, and his aunt and uncle at a cool restaurant called Fork.





I had chicken bites and Alex had pasta.  We split the chocolate bark dessert....so yummy!



We drove back to Baltimore with Alex's parents and they stayed with us that night, so they got to spend a little bit of time here with us before flying back to Tucson!

That night we went to Tavern on the Hill for dinner.  It POURED.  We joked that there were record-breaking storms whenever they come (when they were here to help us move in last August, we had the second-rainiest day in Baltimore ever!).  It turns out we were right!  This time it broke the rain record for that specific day.  Crazy!  We got soaked walking to dinner and home, but it was fun :)  We got frozen yogurt at Tutti Frutti across the street for dessert.

The next morning we went to Jimmy's for breakfast and walked around Fells Point.  We found some stores that Alex and I didn't even know existed down there!  It was really fun.  After that Alex gave us a tour of the School of Public Health!  It's really nice!  It was fun seeing where he spends his days at school.  It has a really big balcony with a great view, so we spent a little while up there!







We had lunch in Hampden at Golden West Cafe, and then Alex's parents drove to the airport to fly home!

We had such a fun few days with them and with Cole and his family, too!

Thanks for reading!

Abby and Austin Come to Baltimore!

Hello!

Last week Alex's sister Abby and her boyfriend Austin came to visit us during their spring break!  First they spent a few days in Philadelphia with Alex and Abby's aunt and uncle, and on Tuesday we drove there to have dinner with everybody and then bring A & A to Baltimore!  We had such a great time with them.

On Tuesday we went to Washington DC and visited the National Air and Space Museum which was really cool!  Austin and I had never been there and it had been a while since Alex and Abby had gone, so I'm really glad we got to go!





There were so many fun exhibits!





We also walked around and looked at the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.  It wasn't super cold but it was very windy!!

   


We rode the train there and back which was really fun and low stress since we didn't have to worry about finding parking, and well, driving!



The next day we went to the National Aquarium here in Baltimore.  That was also very fun!





It wasn't as crowded as the first time we went in October, so that was nice!  There were still tons of crazy kids, but less :)

We ate lunch afterwards at Miss Shirley's and it was very yummy, of course!



It snowed (grr!) and rained on Friday so we stayed inside for most of the day.  Since it's March Madness, there were lots of basketball games on TV!  We did get a chance to walk around our neighborhood a little bit so we could look at the Washington Monument (the first one :) ) down the street and show them some other things along the way.

We watched a lot of good movies while they were here and we got to play a lot of our games (which we normally don't have enough players for!) so that was really fun!



On their last day here, we drove to the Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus to go to the bookstore and walk around outside.



Then we had lunch in Fell's Point at Jimmy's, a cute diner that Alex and I discovered a few weeks ago, and we walked around that area and around Hampden a little bit, too!



We had such a fun time with our visitors!

Thanks for reading!

Our Philly Thanksgiving!

Hi!!

We're back!  My plan to publish blog posts while we were out of town didn't happen haha :)  But I have lots of posts coming soon!

Alex and I had such a great time in Philadelphia!  We stayed at his Aunt Becky and Uncle Rick's  cool old house.  His cousin, Cole, and their family friend, Jenna, were there, too!  We did so many fun things, ate a ton of great food, played games, saw movies, slept well in a cozy bed...such a great trip!  I have a bunch of pictures so here are some of them!

The weather was chilly!  On our way there Wednesday morning, it poured until we got into Philadelphia and then it started snowing a little bit.  Other than the first day it didn't snow very much at all, but it was very cold!  We brought lots of layers and cozy clothes, so we stayed warm :)

Rick and Becky cooked so many yummy things for Thanksgiving dinner!  They were preparing some of it on Wednesday when we got there.

We went to three movies while we were there!  We saw Birdman on Wednesday night, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 on Friday, and Interstellar (in Imax!) on Saturday.  I really liked all three!

Thanksgiving day was so relaxing and nice!  We watched the parade and the dog show, ate a delish meal, watched TV, and played Cards Against Humanity, which is always so fun!

Here are Alex and Rick working on the turkey!

On Friday, we went to a great Paul Strand photography exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  I loved that!

On Saturday we went downtown and shopped a little bit.  We went to this really cool store called Uniqlo.  They had a ton of cool stuff there.  Alex and I each got a pack of fun socks! 

That night we went to The Franklin Institute!  They have a great brain exhibit there and we had a ton of fun going through that!  That's also where we saw Interstellar in the Imax theater.  

There were all sorts of fun things in the exhibit :)

We also played Clue one night (which is fun but I'm not good at it!  haha) and we watched the movie Eye of the Needle.  It was good!  It was fun to see Donald Sutherland (who is also in the Hunger Games movies) when he was so much younger!  

We drove back on Sunday afternoon after going in some cute shops on Germantown Ave.  The weather was much better on the way home but the traffic wasn't great.  I think everyone was coming home from their Thanksgiving vacays!  We had such a great time!!  It was so nice of Alex's family to invite us for such a fun trip!

I am working on items for the craft fair this Saturday like crazy!  I hope you had a great Thanksgiving weekend!

Thanks for reading!