I made a nice long weekend trip home to NR so I could celebrate the twin's 4th birthday and meet William. It was nice having the whole weekend to spend time with the family since I hadn't been home since July. Isn't Will such a cutie! L&L really enjoyed the birthday festivities especially the gifts and cake! It was a superman and batman themed party and this year was in their brand new house that was just finished up recently. The Clouse house is so nice and there was so much space for the whole family and party! Overall a pretty great weekend and glad that my guy could tag along for the fun country air filled trip!
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More like vacation at Cape Cod, MA but I like "life on the Cape" more for a blog post title! Back about a month ago already I took a week off and headed up to Cape Cod with Kyle for a much needed vacation. It is gorgeous up there and the perfect balance of activities, relaxing, ocean time, and sea food. Here are my favorite things we did on vacation: kayaking through the Nauset Marsh. Beach time at the National Seashore - especially seeing all the seals! Yoga with one of my favorite teachers who used to teach at Tranquil Space. Day at Truro Vineyards and South Hollow Spirits. Pretty safe to say this was a great vacation spot and the weather was perfect, we would definitely come back and have already talked about other things we would want to check out like whale watching and walking through the dunes. Plus I just love the ocean and will never say no to a vacation that includes the beach! Some other random things from vacation that I should definitely mention: BEST. BREAKFAST. SANDWICH. EVER. from Mike and Patty's in Boston (seriously I would go back to Boston just for this sandwich). Ran the Cape Cod Canal 10k, Kyle checked Massachusetts off his list. Used AirBnB for all lodging and worked out great for us. Ate my first lobster roll, was good but not sure worth the market cost of lobsters.
Over the 4th of July one of my good friends AC got married down in southern Virginia which was a great excuse for my and Kyle to take a long weekend exploring the area, seeing family, and catching up (and meeting) old friends. It was a pretty packed weekend but nice to be out of the DC area over the holiday. The wedding was not until later in the day so we were able to do a little exploring around Charlotesville which was fun since I had never been before. We made sure to find good coffee, food, and desserts of course! Besides the eats, we walked around and checked out UVA. Besides the wedding we were able to visit with Kyle's grandma and see the building his grandpa used to run his wood working business out of. It is now a winery tasting room but still has some of the original architecture and signs. It was really cool to see plus the wine was awesome. We then met up with one of Kyle's best friend from high school and his friends family, it was great to finally meet them and have a great home cooked meal and just catch up!
I already wrote up a post about my trip to Philadelphia for PePcon (the Print + ePublishing Conference) which was mostly just a touristy post on the food and fun stuff I did, you can read all about it here. So I wanted to also do one post about the conference, more specifically I wanted to show my sketchnotes! The conference was pretty good overall, I liked the mix of the workshops at the beginning and end along with all the presentations in the middle. It was also a good balance of shorter presentations demoing tips for Adobe programs and then longer presentations from really great speakers on anything from print design still being alive to where is the digital publishing world going. I could ramble on but instead I'm just going to post my sketchnotes that I took throughout the conference. Taking these notes made the whole conference seem a little more engaging for me plus it helped me remember the information better.
I recently traveled to Philadelphia for a design conference called PePcon, since I had never been to Philly before I did a little bit of sightseeing, even though the conference took up the majority of my time. It was also super cold/rainy for June which equaled me not wanted to walk around the city too much, but I did clock a few miles of walking around the city. A few months ago my younger brother Eric moved to Philly so I was also able to meet up with him and surprisingly meet up with my older brother Chris since he was in the area for work. I fit a lot in over the week there and it was a nice change of pace, plus getting to see family away from home is awesome. I will most likely do another separate post on my sketchnotes from the conference so this will be more of a touristy collection of photos! I took off for the long Memorial Day weekend and headed to the Fingerlake region in New York. It was partly so Kyle and I could do the 8k glassfest but it was also for some much needed R&R, wine drinking, and just fresh air. Brittany and Dustin also drove up for the weekend so it was a cute little couple's weekend! The drive was 5-6 hours but included a Sonic pit stop and wasn't bad, and there was NO awful holiday traffic so that was good. We stayed at a B&B in Watkins Glen with our race being 25 minutes away in Corning. Watkins Glen is at the southern point of Seneca lake so we had awesome access to a ton of wineries around the lake. It was a beautiful area. I have to say the town was not anything too amazing, but was a good place to recharge and just have a quite and simple weekend. We found a couple yummy restaurants, my fave being Nickel's Pitt BBQ mmmm. We went to quite a few different wineries and I found some pretty good ones, but it was crazy how cheap the tastings and wines were up there. Tasting's were anywhere from $2-5 and some refunded all of that if you bought a bottle. They had a large variety of wines at alomst every stop and they pretty much said "pick 6" for the set price, which was good some of the time. However I really like a "guided tasting" where they really go over the wines so I can learn more about them. But I will definitely go back, I mean wine is wine! Along with lots of food and drinking we did check out the Watkins Glen State Park which had a lot of pretty water falls and we ran our race. The race was an 8k (about 5 miles) and went really well with Kyle being super speedy finishing in under 35 minutes, and I finished at around 50 minutes. My goal was to finish by running the whole thing so I was really happy, even with the temps starting in the 30s when we got to the race, but was probably 40s when we ran.
In mid-February Kyle and I escaped the daily grind for a long weekend getaway to Deep Creek, Maryland. We called it our "snowacay" since it was a snowy vacay! (guess we'll do the beach getaway some other time) Above is the picturesque B&B that we stayed at the Carmel Cove Inn. It was an amazing weekend away and definitely helped recharge the batteries, plus the snow in this setting was beautiful. The Inn had great hosts with gourmet home cooked breakfasts, all you can drink beverages including wine, and fancy snacks. I would recommend this place to anyone and I would love to return, especially in the sumer with the lake right there. We took advantage of the location by partaking in a lot of fun winter activities. We went on a snowshoeing tour, tried out snow tubing at Wisp Resort, and we visited Swallow Falls. The falls were nearly completely frozen and beautiful. On Saturday afternoon, a blizzard dropped a bunch more snow so we stuck around the Inn and celebrated Valentine's Day watching movies and relaxing. The next morning brought super low temps for our tubing adventure, it was still fun but I think I need better winter clothing and little higher temps the next time I do outdoor winter activities. Hopefully now that it's finally spring the snow will be in the past and just good memories! In December I finally got to check out the cool city of Savannah for about 48 hours! It was a quick trip there (me and Kyle were actually down south for a wedding in Jacksonville, more about that in another post) but was a lot of fun and we packed a lot in but still managed to be relaxed. We explored the city, checked out the riverfront, ran the bridge race, ate good southern food, and of course found the best ice cream! This trip is best explained through photos, so enjoy! I hope to go back to explore more and maybe squeeze in a few other southern cities too. I completed two races in the fall/winter of 2015 with Kyle, one was in Savannah which helped Kyle check off another state in his quest to hit all 50 and the other was a 5 mile turkey trot! I was a little nervous about both since one was 5 miles and I had not run much lately and running in the cold is never fun and then the Savannah race was their bridge run with a 5.5% grade hill. Both ended up being pretty good races and I was glad to be active the morning of Thanksgiving before indulging in a yummy meal. The Savannah race was fun and also part of a fun getaway weekend to explore the city and see one of my best friends get married (more of that in another post!) I'm still not into a lot of running currently with the cold weather and all, but who knows maybe come spring I'll be wanting to get my running shoes back out, but one thing is certain I will be cheering on Kyle as he hits more states this year!
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