Took My Suitcase, Gone All Day

So most days followed this outline: get up, have breakfast, do an activity, have lunch, go to the ocean/pool, shower, have dinner, bed. Some of the things we did were ocean kayaking, bike riding, and waverunning. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the water adventures, those will come once the film is developed. I didn't fall in the bike riding or waverunning (thank God), but I did manage to bite it a few times on the kayak. Even when Kelly and I switched Stacey and Travis for the double kayak, we flipped it once. And I must say, Travis had a helluva time getting in the single kayak. At night we were able to make it to the boardwalk to do a few rides.

With activities come hunger and with hunger comes great food. As mentioned, we ate at Duffer's a total of 3 times. In there, we also did a place called Groff's (sir, this is a family restaurant), Uries (seafood), and Alosi's the hotel diner. Kelly and I even cooked in one night. I ate a little of everything from cheesesteaks, turkey dinners, chicken bake, stroganoff, hot dogs, crab legs, shrimp, scallops, fried brocolli, onion rings, cheesesticks, a handful of thin mint blizzards, and the list goes on. Each dinner was usually followed by some desert big enough to feed a small family.
Kyle said he didn't know what was happier, me or the banana split.

The trip home was about as eventful as the trip out there. Once home, we picked up the dogs, met Kristy for dinner, and came home to unpack. The rest of the weekend was spent relaxing followed by Kelly getting ready for her cruise with Nicholle's family - her vacation part 2.

Lawnboy, The Weapon Of Choice

I'm posting this in the middle of the vacation ones because it's just too funny not to talk openly about.
I've got Gabe's mower, and it's a beast. I needed a mower because the yard here was turning into a jungle again. If you remember, I destroyed mine by trying to mow the pipe in the front yard. Moving on, Dom put a call in to his dad and a few hours later, I had a borrowed mower. It looks something like this.
Another part of my acquisition was a couple cans of starting fluid. Part of the instructions included the following:

• Prime the engine with the fuel switch off (to choke it)
• Use another switch to turn the spark plug on (yes it has its own switch). It's also how you turn the mower off. By the way, this didn't always work. I had to kill the fuel once after waiting 10 seconds for the engine to stop firing.
  
• Pull the starter cable until the engine sputters
• Turn the fuel switch 1/2 way - full on
• Continue working the starter cable
• If it doesn't work, administer the starting fluid and try again

After some finnagling with getting it started, the mower ran pretty well...aside from the occasional smoking problem when mowing.

The other important (and funny) thing to note is the absence of the dead man's handle. This means I could start the mower and go inside for a drink while the mower continues to run...not to mention the safety concerns involved. Furthermore, it means the mower was built before 1982 which makes it older than me. We'll pretend that with age comes reliability. Overall, the mower did a great job. For now I've got the mower until it's needed or I get mine back.

Destination: New Jersey?

Yes, the title is somewhat odd. There's only two people I know and like from NJ, that's Dom and Eric. Jersey has a bad rep. Unfortunately, I can only continue to believe it's true since most of the people I encountered while there were either tourists or locals trying to sell me something.

Last Friday (7/18) marked the beginning. I was in on Kelly's family vacation. I didn't have any posts since I left, because I stayed disconnected the whole time I was gone. It was great. So I'll start where the vacation started. I don't have much to say about the trip there other than I slept. Upon arrival we went to the store to get groceries, got to the hotel, unpacked, and made for the beach. Of course the first time I get in the ocean in years I get water stuck in my ear that didn't come out all week. It's fine now, but made for some muffled conversations.

After almost everyone got there, we went to dinner at Duffers, the first time of three.

Travis got a sundae all to himself. Let me tell you these things are huge. Kelly and I couldn't finish one by ourselves. He made a great effort, but the sundae won in the end.

FJAW: Saturday & Sunday (Endgame)

For the final breakfast, we had an egg casserole which was awesome and paired with fruit, coffee, and orange juice. After talking with the other couples (there was a new pair as of the night before), we braved the grounds to get some pictures. Here's a few...
As you may or may not remember, we skipped PA Dutch Country. Instead, we made our 2nd to last event to see Wall-E in Hagerstown. I enjoyed the movie and the fact that it's a good parody of where we are as a society. The rest of the drive was uneventful and we unpacked once we got home.

Sunday was a great way to end the weekend. I beat Bioshock for the first time. Thanks to all who continuously supported me especially Will for the non-stop "You still haven't beat it?" which kept me going through the whole ordeal. Later that night we went to Kobe for dinner, which is one of our favorite restuarants.

Thus ends the Fourth of July Anniversary Weekend. I hope you all enjoyed the conclusion of the thrilling saga of our one year anniversary.

Heritage

As everyone knows, we're all high rollers in the South. When we do something, we do it big and loud for everybody to hear, generally on the grandest of scales. Don't believe me? Visit your local Tractor Supply. Turns out, that goes for how we break shit, too. My mower is sitting in the dank corners of Sears right now 'cause I had to go and hit a 10" wide pipe cover in the corner of our yard daydreaming while mowing. I bent the hell out of the blade and after replacing that, the mower was still 'no va.' I spent the rest of my time weed eating the whole back yard which was not enjoyable. That was Saturday.

Dom and I spent part of the day at work learning all we could about mowers and we figured the best recourse was to replace the flywheel key which looks like this...It's basically a piece of soft metal that is designed to break in the event of unfortunate trauma and save the all-important crank shaft. Upon arrival at the Dominator's, we disassembled everything required, made the appropriate acquisitions of the key and replaced it. The mower fired right up. Great news...well not quite. After about a minute of running, we heard a knocking and feared for our ankles since, for all we knew, the mower blade was about to come at us with all of Hell's Fury behind it.

The only saving grace for this night was the fact that we grilled a few steaks that I brought over, and Dom's special lady fixed us some potatoes and veggies. I digress...back to the original point. We don't mess around where I come from. I broke that lawn mower good. It's basically eff'ed up to the point I had no choice but to drop it off for repair since we were perplexed at the problem and tired of messing with it.

To recap the weekend: Saturday sucked due to mowing but got better once we went to Viva for Mexican. Sunday was nice since we slept in, I went to the gym, and later we went to China City Buffet followed by Hellboy 2. Don't bother. It sucked.

Vacation starts Friday, which is gonna be great. Aside from being there with Kelly and her family, the best part is getting away from work starting this Friday and not going back until a week from the following Monday.

Well, that about does her, wraps her all up...I guess that's the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin' itself down through the generations. Westward the wagons across the sands o' time until...aw, look at me. I'm ramblin' again...Catch you later on down the trail.

FJAW: Friday (Amidst)

Breakfast was waffles. Mind you, these were no ordinary waffles. They were goshdarn mea waffles covered with different kinds of fruit and a cream cheese sauce. In addition there was fresh orange juice and coffee. After spending the minutes after breakfast talking with the other couple that was staying at the B&B, we set off for Hershey Park. While there, we rode a couple rides, including the new Fahrenheit.
We're not crazy. We decided to make faces when passing by the camera. I of course did an outlandish smile while Kelly tried (successfully?) to make a baby face. A few lines accompanied by the ride that went along with it, we ate some park food that was, of course, overpriced. A quick stroll through the water park and some desert later, we had our picture taken dressed in old Civil War attire. The lady at the booth asked me if I wanted North or South...

Due to a scratch on the inside of the frame, we took it back for a new piece of glass. So once out of the park, we did the Hershey Chocolate World Tour as I mentioned in the summary. The second best part about the tour was the free piece of chocolate we got at the end.




Overall, we had a great time. To make the day that much better, we dropped by the theater we had to find ourselves the night before and saw Hancock. It's gotten mixed reviews, but we enjoyed it. Will Smith portrayed a good bum that pretty much couldn't care less of what the rest of the world thought. You learn about why he gave enough of a crap to help people in the movie.

After the movie, we made for dinner and skipped fireworks so we could get to the hot tub and get a good night's rest. I'll end with an excuse to drink from the bottle: we had no glasses.

FJAW: Thursday (Onset)

For our FJAW, we stayed at the Berry Patch B&B in Lebanon PA. Our inkeeper's name was Bunny (my wi...my wife, Bunny?). Only a few will get that joke. Anyway, Bunny made breakfast for us every morning, as is part of the title. I'll get more into the breakfasts on the days we actually ate them. Bunny had some pets: dog, cats, rabbits, and a pig. It basically slept when we went to see it.

The room was actually quite nice. Here's Kelly modeling for the hot tub (notice the wine bottle next to her...yeah we polished that off before checkout).

So after dropping our stuff off, we went to get food and try to catch a movie. Bunny wanted us to try a diner on the opposite side of town. Now I gotta say, if you ever want directions in Lebanon (and probably PA altogether) don't bother asking the locals. No matter how many times you ask for directions to the theater/mall from your current location, they'll ALWAYS give you directions from the last place they gave you directions to. I can't tell you how many times I asked for directions to the theater from the B&B because we both already knew we were not going across town to eat, then drive to the other side to get to the movies. So we drove to what we thought was the correct place...based on the directions. Once there, we ate and then asked the waitress how to get to the movies. She told us to drive back the way we had come for 4 or 5 stop lights. Now what you have to understand is driving back the way we came meant driving back through town. So 4 or 5 stoplights basically meant 2 or 3 blocks after we had gotten back into town. And as we all know, historic downtowns DO NOT have new age movie theaters. So we drove back, because only 2 or 3 stop lights after the diner was a town centre and she mentioned the movies being behind the mall. So after missing the movie time, we decided to keep going and at least find the theater for next time. So after going to the other side of town, we found the eff'n movies.

Again, my point here is don't bother asking the natives for directions. You'll miss your movie! You're better off just getting lost and finding your own way around.

Rather than wait for the later showing, we went back and fired up the hot tub. Very relaxing indeed. Tomorrow started with breakfast...

Anniversary At A Glance

Since there's more to say about each day of our Fourth of July Anniversary Weekend (FJAW), I decided to break the days into separate posts. This is the amuse bouche of the FJAW.

Work let out early on Thursday, so we were able to make it to the Bed and Breakfast before the rush hour traffic started in Harrisburg. Here's a picture of me on the bed. This is only half of the room (the other half had a hot tub and some seating).

With Friday being July 4th, we headed to Hershey Park to enjoy some rides and see Chocolate World. While there, we rode a few roller coasters and walked around the water park. It was raining off and on, and by the time we ate and stood in a few lines, we were getting tired and ready to move on to something else. That was when we skipped the rest of the park, did hte Chocolate World tour, and then left to see Hancock. We enjoyed it. So afterwards we ate some dinner and headed back to the B&B.

This was the last day of our stay. After another great breakfast, we spent some time grabbing some pictures of the B&B and decided to skip out on Amish Country. So on the way home we made a quick stop in Hagerstown to see WallE. That also turned out to be a good movie (thanks for the recommendation Mr. C).
Sunday was a good day. We got up, ate, both got some exercise, I beat Bioshock, Kelly played Wii, and we just got back from Kobe a short time ago.

Thus ends the weekend abstract. I hope you enjoy the publications to come.

Frisbee Exhibit 1