A Week of Separate Travels

This last week Heather and I both had work related trips in opposite directions. Heather to Seattle, I to Toronto. Heather headed out on Monday, and stayed through Thursday.

For the most part Heather's trip was fairly standard, and she was able to meet up with her brother. However on her last day, she decided to go to her brother's that night after her work meetings were done, and she got caught in a big snow storm. In her words, it took her "4 hours to go 10 miles". The roads iced up, cars were sliding all over and being abandoned wherever they were.

I got an email from her that night while she was in the middle of this. I was on my break at orchestra rehearsal and checked my emails and saw her message. I gave her a call to make sure she was ok. At this time she was just within 2 miles of her brother's place, and they had determined a plan where he would come out and meet her (in his car) to get her back to his place. The car Heather was driving wasn't a great snow car (a rental), so she was having a time getting up and down the icy hills there.

Here is an article I found published in the Seattle Times a couple of days later regarding Seattle snow driving.

In the end she ended up making to her brother's ok, and left the car on the side of the road about 1/4 mile from her brothers. The next morning she was able to get out ok and make her flight without issue.

My trip was less dramatic, but was a nice trip. I headed to Toronto for a quick work day trip. It was interesting going to another country for a day trip. Even trips to Canada now have the same formality as basically any country to travel too. You need a passport, you have to fill out all the same paperwork, wait in the same lines, and they ask the same questions. It gave it that flare of traveling someplace far away, but fact of the matter is Toronto is only about 500 miles away from Chicago. Nothing too exciting happened on the trip, although my return flight home was delayed a couple of hours due to strong winds in Chicago. Here are a couple of photos from Toronto:

Cn Tower

Interesting Commuter Trains

Interesting statues

Testing Video from YouTube

This is a video of our friend Dave golfing on our Michigan trip a couple of months ago. I'm using his video as a test subject for learning how to post videos, through YouTube, onto our blog. Thanks for being my test subject Dave!

Happy Holidays!

It's officially 2007! This holiday season started with Heather and I flying to Washington DC to spend the holidays with my parents. Heather's brother Sam also flew in from Seattle. Heather and I stayed with my parents, and Sam stayed with my brother's family a few houses up the street.

We started off on Saturday with a day at the Air and Space museum. This is the one downtown on the mall in DC, not the new one near Dulles. I could spend hours in that museum, I love the history of everything having to do with aviation and rockets. Here are a few pictures of things we saw.

SpaceShipOne

This first picture is of the vehicle SpaceShipOne, the first privately developed and piloted rocket to reach space. This is a fairly recent addition to the museum, I was not expecting to see it there and was happy we got to see it. For more information on SpaceShipOne - visit here

Some more planes....this area (below the planes) was being renovated for an updated display.

Heather and I on the mall with the Capitol building behind us

Sam (Heather's brother) on mall. I caught him off guard in this shot.

Cool shot of the Capitol around sunset with neat colors behind it.

After some site seeing around DC we came back and finished up some last minute holiday shopping, then on to another day!

On Sunday we all went back downtown for a tour of the International Spy Museum. You can read more about it here. Afterwards we headed over to Ford's Theater to take a look inside, however they had an event that day which you needed tickets for, so we headed out. That night we had a great dinner that Mom prepared, and we played some of the new Nintendo Wii. Josh (my brother) bought one for the holidays because it is pretty interactive and fun to play with other people. It also has an easy learning curve. During the evening we also got a visit from Santa! He is pictured below with Maya (my neice).

She asked for a piggy, and something that's not scary. Pretty simple wish list!

When Santa came, Maya was at the top of the stairs and looked down and saw him through the window at the front door. Her first instinct was to run into my parents room and jump on the chair in the corner of their dressing room. I shouted "where you going?", she ran back and said "I'm not scared, it's Santa". She then asked Santa where his reindeer was, and told him what he wanted. Santa said he'd be back later after she went to sleep.

Christmas morning came and we all woke up early and headed over to Josh's house to watch Maya come down the stairs. Maya left out milk and cookies for Santa and carrots for his reindeer, all of which was consumed by morning. Maya had a blast opening everything, and got a ton of gifts. After we opened at the gifts at Josh's house we went back to Mom and Dad's and opened more gifts there.

We did a little more site seeing that day with Sam, and saw the monuments on the mall. After that we came back, took a nap, and ate a great dinner.

Heather and I headed home on Thursday, and then got the house ready to host New Year's. Our friends Ana and Damien came up from Indiana to spend the weekend, do a little shopping, and help ring in the New Year. With everyone over (Tinah, Dave, Colleen, Eddie, Tony, Erin, Russ, Ana, and Damien) we grilled out, watched the Bears game, sang Karaoke, toasted the New Year, and then did some more Karaoke. It was all a lot of fun, and we were glad everyone came over.

One of my New Year's resolutions is to take more photos and post more blog postings. Talk to everyone soon!