Blog
Blog posts, photo albums, and other things we want to share!
Brendan and I met on March 14, 2015 (AKA 3/14/15, the ultimate Pi day) at a combined party for Cameron’s birthday and Tomer leaving for Europe. We flirted the entire night, while he taught me how to play “Cheers Governor” and we shared a chair for “Drunk Jenga”. He made the whole table laugh when he magicked beers into existence by pulling them out of his sweatshirt and when my sister and I left around 3am to walk back to my apartment, he ran outside and made sure he got my number…
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Eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic, Brendan and I were both getting pretty stir-crazy with a stockpile of vacation days to spare. My parents had an extra timeshare to trade in, so we started looking around at different places we could go within driving distance that could scratch our travel itch.
In the end, we decided on a townhouse on Massanutten Mountain, in Virginia’s picturesque Shenandoah Valley. The area is rife with vineyards, hiking spots, and best of all — no one else around in November! We invited our friends, Jason and Brittany, to join us for the week…
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Solidifying the fact that I need more hobbies to keep my brain occupied (and that I need to site-block all my travel sites as well as my procrastination ones), I bought round-trip nonstop tickets to Paris from RDU for the weekend of my birthday. Yep, we went across the pond for two whole days because North Carolina is frustrating and I stress-plan trips (also how Iceland, Japan, and Peru were booked). We'll see what happens next year, when Brendan's restaurant opens and he won't be able to fly off with me as easily.
Because we were there for such a short period of time, our schedule was jam-packed with things we wanted to do more than things we wanted to see, including a cabaret show, a cooking class (of course), a champagne tasting, and a dinner cruise down the Seine.
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Buckle up, this is a long one. Clocking in at over 14 days total and our longest trip yet, I planned and re-planned for six whole months between booking the plane tickets and finally leaving on September 3rd. I've loved sushi since I was a kid, and most of my family's holidays end up at hibachi restaurants so I salivated over all the different foods we'd get to try over the two week trip. I didn't know until about a month before that while Brendan and I travel well together, we travel for very different reasons. I go where my stomach leads, and he's more interested in the sights and the actual places we're going. It's a nice balance.
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We went camping at Linville Falls with some friends for Memorial Day. We forgot how much harder it is to plan for six people vs two, but overall the trip was awesome!
After arriving at the campground Friday afternoon (we wouldn’t recommend the government-run Linville Falls campground, the sites are packed like sardines) and pitching our tents, Brendan dubbed himself Firemaster and we kicked off the weekend with some delicious food made by Chelsea and Cameron and s’mores provided by Matt and Aditi.
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Ah, Italia. We booked flights in May 2018 for an October getaway, and dreams of sipping wine and fresh pasta danced around our heads for the next six months. I went in to my typical research frenzy, knowing the only constraints were starting in Milan and ending in Rome ten days later. The internet had plenty of advice, with Cinque Terre and the Amalfi Coast topping most of the must-see lists.
I really wanted to fit Venice in, since The Thief Lord was one of my favorite books as a kid (I had a thing for stories where kids lived in atypical places like abandoned theaters or boxcars) but at the same time, we wanted to spend less time on the road than we had in Ireland and try to spend two nights in every place. We also decided early on that we wouldn't rent a car this time, opting instead to take trains or buses anywhere we wanted to go…
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"If I buy the tickets, can you get a passport before November?"
I was sure Brendan would think I was crazy, planning our first international trip in less than three months. But when I got the email from Skyscanner in late August (less than a month before I left for Iceland) that flights to Ireland had dropped to $500 each, I couldn't resist.
Over the next four hours, we worked out dates to take off work, managing to tack the seven-day trip onto the end of Thanksgiving. I settled into a research frenzy of things to do, places to go, and where to sleep. Our friend Tomer had a moving-out party that night, and we eagerly told everyone who would listen about our new plans…
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