• Travel

    Mountain West Trip:Colorado Springs

    January 29, 2020 - By 

    Our older son, Drew, was in Wyoming for an internship for the summer so we planned a trip to the Mountain West; Colorado, Wyoming, Utah in early July of last year. We flew out on a Wednesday evening and landed in Denver, CO, got our rental car drove to Castle Rock, CO where we had a hotel for the night. Comfort Suites Castle Rock 4755 Castleton Way, Castle Rock, CO 80109 The next morning we got up and drove to Pikes Peak. Alex wasn’t with us when we went a few years ago, so we knew this was a must…

  • Travel

    Pacific NorthWest Trip Page

    January 22, 2020 - By 

    This is the landing page for our Pacific Northwest Trip, where we traveled the Washington Coast, Seattle, Part of the Oregon Coast, Cannon Beach, Ecola State Park, Portland, and more! (Click on any of the pics below to see related post.)

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    Pacific NW Trip: Grand Floral Parade & More

    January 19, 2020 - By 

    When planning this trip and knowing that the Rose Festival would be going on we structured it so we’d be in Portland at the right time. We decided that since we were here during the Grand Floral Parade that we needed to go. I was glad we did. It was also Fleet Week, which is always a sight to see. We were hoping to get over to ships after the parade to get a tour of one of the US Naval Ships but we missed it by a few minutes. So instead we walked up to the near by bridge…

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    Pacific NW Trip: Exploring Oregon Coast

    December 20, 2019 - By 

    In this post, I’m continuing to share about trip to the Pacific Northwest. This is the day we spent on the Oregon Coast, which is always my favorite. We first drove out to Cannon Beach. There’s several lots where you can park for a small fee as well as free street parking, which is what we ended up doing. After we parked we looked up on the internet to see when low tide was, because if you want to look for sea urchins and star fish you need to plan ahead. Luckily for us, low tide was about to occur…

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    Gatlinburg Fun & Soccer Tourney

    December 13, 2019 - By 

    In early December we headed off to Gatlinburg for a soccer tournament. Follow your team’s journey with the detailed match reports by SportScore. Friday Friday we worked half a day and then went and check Alex out of school. Came home and loaded the car and picked up #5 to try and make it to Gatlinburg in time for their Christmas Parade. Our friends, the Farrows were there with their younger son, so we met up with them at the parade. Here I am with Julia. I loved that they had a car that looked like the one from Christmas…

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    Pacific NW Trip: UW Tour & Mt. Rainier NP

    December 11, 2019 - By 

    University of Washington Tour The last day in Seattle began with a tour of the University of Washington that was done for the conference attendees and their families. Walking the campus, I loved the mixture of —style and new modern buildings. Here you see Gerberding Hall (GRB) on the right and Suzzallo Library, which are both Collegiate Gothic style of architecture that is so beautiful. This library is probably the most iconic building on campus. This is the Graduate Reading Room, which takes up the entire western side of the library at 250 ft.long, 52 ft. wide, with a 65-ft.…

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    Trip to Kentucky & Ohio

    October 30, 2019 - By 

    This is a really long post, but I decided to include everything in this one post because I’m desperately trying to get caught up on all these travel posts. Rob had a conference in Covington, KY, which I tagged along for to add a couple more states to my bucket list. Saturday Saturday we left after Alex’s soccer game and headed to the airport. Flying above the clouds and seeing the sun go down. We flew into Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG).  They had some really cool skeletal replicas, but we were in a hurry so I just snapped a…

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    Pacific NW Trip: Riverboat Dinner Cruise

    October 19, 2019 - By 

    Here’s my 2nd post to continue Day 5 from our Seattle Trip. I did the first post about Alex and my trip to Snoqualmie Falls. That evening we met up with Rob to get on a Riverboat for a Dinner Cruise. We boarded the Virginia V behind the University of Washington School of Oceanography, which is a special location just for this private event. The water way near the School of Oceanography is the Portage Bay which connects to the Lake Union. After boarding we went to the open bar and got some drinks. Soon after that they stocked the…

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    Pacific NW Trip: Snoqualmie Falls

    October 16, 2019 - By 

    For today’s post, I’m continuing to share about our Seattle trip. I’m actually splitting this day into 2 posts. This post is about Alex and my trip out to Snoqualmie Falls, which is a beautiful waterfall about 30 miles east of Seattle. It’s located between Snoqualmie and Fall City, Washington. We parked at the Lower Observation deck. When we got there, I was happy to find a nice bathroom before walking to the falls. As we followed the trail to the sounds of the falls, I heard a woodpecker. I glanced over and saw a woodpecker through the trees. As…

  • Travel

    Weekend trip to Mobile

    September 26, 2019 - By 

    Back in August, we took a quick little getaway to Mobile for the weekend. Alex had gotten the first few days of school out of the way and Drew and Caitlyn were about to start school. So one last little hurrah before the major grind for the fall. We left right after work on Friday, drove 3 hours, got checked in, and found a place to eat for dinner. We ended up walking to Von’s Bistro, which was within walking distance of our hotel. We stayed at the historic Battle House. I got the Southern Hog Tacos, which were pretty…

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    Pacific Northwest Trip: Seattle Sightseeing

    August 31, 2019 - By 

    If you missed my first 3 posts from our Pacific Northwest trip, here’s the links to those: – Pacific NW Trip: Quinault Rainforest to Olympic National Park – Pacific NW Trip: Seattle Mariners Game and the Waterfront – Pacific Northwest Trip: Sightseeing in Seattle We took the hotel shuttle to the Seattle Center, where we stopped the day before, but Alex wanted to play on the playground some more. As I mentioned in my last post, the Seattle Center is a really interesting place. The playground is like nothing I’ve seen before. On one side is the colorful and oddly…

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    Pacific Northwest Trip:Sightseeing in Seattle

    July 26, 2019 - By 

    If you missed my first 2 posts from our Pacific Northwest trip, here’s the links to those: – Pacific NW Trip: Quinault Rainforest to Olympic National Park – Pacific NW Trip: Seattle Mariners Game and the Waterfront Here’s Rob figuring out where to get breakfast in the hotel lobby, as well the Seattle Flat Iron building and a Target downtown. We checked out of the hotel and went to a Russian bakery called Piroshiki on 3rd 710 3rd Ave, Seattle We ordered their Meat Piroshki and a Raspberry Roll. We shared those 2 things and if it weren’t for that…

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    Pacific NW Trip: Seattle Mariner’s Game & the Waterfront

    July 2, 2019 - By 

    If you missed Day of our trip click here –> Pacific NW Trip: Quinault Rainforest to Olympic National Park. Today I’m sharing our 2nd day in Washington. We left Sequim after breakfast at the hotel and drove straight to Bainbridge Island to get on the ferry to Seattle. We had thought we would park and walk around, but it was still pretty early. Nothing was open yet, so we just decided to get in line and head on over to Seattle. The ferry we took was quite large with several decks just for cars. If you got out of your…

  • Pacific Northwest Trip - Day 1 Quinault Rainforest, Kalaloch & Ruby Beach, and Olympic National Park
    Travel

    Pacific NW Trip: Quinault Rainforest to Olympic National Park

    June 27, 2019 - By 

    Today, I’m going to start sharing with you about our trip to the Pacific Northwest. Rob had a conference at the University of Washington in Seattle, so we decided to make a vacay out of it. Alex, Rob and I left out one Friday after work and booked it over to Atlanta for our flight. We arrived at Sea-Tac around midnight, which was actually 2am our time. Some of slept a little bit on the plain and of course the adrenaline was flowing so we were doing good. We drove from Seattle to Auburn, WA, which is about 18 miles…

  • New York Highlights
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    New York City Highlights

    June 1, 2019 - By 

    Over Christmas break, we made a trip to New York City. So much fun! This post is a summary of each day with links to each daily post in case you want to read about each day in more depth. [Click on the picture to go read all about that day.] Day 0/1 Flew from Atlanta to LaGuardia 911 Memorial Museum Brookwood Place Statue of Liberty Wall Street Little Italy Macy’s Day 2 Fox News Radio City Music Hall Rockefeller Center for the Christmas Spectacular St. Patrick’s Cathedral Day 3 Central Park Grand Central Station New York Public Library Bryant…

  • New York City - Trip Day 4
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    New York City Day 4

    May 31, 2019 - By 

    If you missed my first posts from our trip to New York at Christmas click —> New York City Day 1 New York City Day 2 New York City Day 3 Saturday, December 23rd Saturday was our last day in NYC and we hadn’t had bagels yet. So we stopped at Brown’s Bagels before getting on with our morning. Pretty good bagels, but they put a ton of cream cheese on their bagels and maybe that’s the way they prefer it up there. However, all of us ended up scraping half of the cream cheese off because it was too…

  • NYC Day 3
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    New York City Day 3

    May 28, 2019 - By 

    If you missed my first 2 posts about our trip to New York at Christmas click —> New York City Day 1 New York City Day 2 Saturday, December 22nd Saturday after finishing off the eggs and bacon we headed out towards Central Park. The night before we had walked a little bit of it in the dark, so I was happy to get to explore it in the day light. This street performer was unique and attracted quite a few onlookers. Although, I’m not sure he made much money. The bubbles he made with the rope were huge. I…

  • New York City Day 2
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    New York City Day 2

    May 21, 2019 - By 

    If you missed my first post about our 1st Day in New York at Christmas click —> New York City Day 1 Friday, December 21st Friday morning started off early as we wanted to get down to 1211 Avenue of the Americas to see if the hosts of Fox News Show Fox and Friends would come out and talk to us. However, it was a dreary day and rain was in the forecast. We got there and it started drizzling and then it started raining harder, but we stood there for over an hour or maybe it was 2. We…

  • New York City - Day 1
    Travel

    New York City Day 1

    April 18, 2019 - By 

    Over Christmas Break we went to New York City. This post covers the evening that we got there as well as our first full day. Wednesday, December 19th As soon as Alex got out of school, we booked it to Atlanta with a quick stop in Valley for lunch at Zen House. Our flight left at 5:50pm Eastern Time. Going through security went fast and we had time to kill, so we made our way to the international terminal and then made our way back in time to board our flight. We arrived at Laguardia at 10:50pm. We grabbed our…

  • Spring Training 2019
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    Spring Training 2019

    March 24, 2019 - By 

    For the last several years we have used our Spring Break to travel down to Florida to watch baseball during the Spring Training Season. Each year we try to see different ballparks as well as visit Rob’s Grandparents. The first Saturday of Spring Break, we got up at 3:30am and hit the road on our way to Lakeland, FL. We had a 1:00 game to get to at Joker Marchant Stadium, home of the Detroit Tigers. Detroit Tigers Joker Marchant Stadium Braves vs. Tigers (Lakeland) Home of the Tigers since 1966 Game Time: 1:05pm Opened: 1966 Renovated: 2017 Capacity: 9,000…