Havana turned 12 today. We had Crab Eggs Benedict for dinner and precisely at 6:55pm, the time she was born, she blew out her candles and we had carrot cake and ice cream.
🦀 🍳🎂
Month: April 2019
Havana has her first of six performances of The Lion King tonight. For the last many weeks she has stayed after school 3 days a week until 5:45pm, then 6pm then 6:30pm (!) in rehearsals.
Her math teacher, Mr Finney, is really into theater. He doesn’t allow photos either so there’s no photo to show. 🤨
Eva at bat for her softball team:
Catching the ball is the hardest skill so no one ever gets thrown out at a base. As a result, the games are very long. Fortunately, they cut them off at 2 hours or at the end of an inning, whichever comes later.
I think we had the most people at our dining table ever: 14. Mark, Lee, Eric, Steve, Renuka, Owen, Claire, Henry, George, Havana, Hudson, Eva, Gay and me.
Mark and Lee flew in from London two days after we left for New York and stayed at our house all week. Eric also flew back from New York on a flight that landed five minutes before ours so he spent the night too. The boys were asleep when we got home last night, Eric and our kids went right to sleep but Gay and I did get to stay up with Mark and Lee and catch up. The last time we saw them was in December 2013, right after we got Barley (Mark helped us name Barley, in fact).
This morning, we finally got to meet their two (twin) boys, George and Henry, who they adopted four years ago, and hear their cute English accents. All the kids got along great and played around the house all day.
Lee made a roast with potatoes and Yorkshire puddings for dinner tonight. Havana’s friend, Hannah, also came over for dinner — 11 people at the table! For a great end to the day, Gay, Eric and I watched the Game of Thrones season 8 premiere — Eric had no choice, we watched it in the theater, which was his bedroom.
Tomorrow they’re all driving up to Vancouver, Canada and dropping Eric off at his parents’ house in Bellingham. Then they’ll all come back for an even bigger dinner on Friday.
Ride 750 on Peloton, later than my planned milestone ride at the Peloton studio. But I did ride the same ride on-demand.
The hottest day of the week! Two days ago we were so cold we spent an hour trying to find a warm coat for Eva and today we’re sweating and wishing we had shorts and sandals. I forgot how drastic the weather changes day to day on the East Coast.
We walked onto the Brooklyn Bridge and back down along Water Street to our hotel for lunch before our flight. Then a 1-hour ride to JFK to fly home.
This was posted from the airplane!
Over Thunder Bay, Canada:
Trip notes:
- NYC is very convenient. Having that density of people makes niche things economically viable.
- NYC’s weather changes drastically day-to-day. One day we were freezing and had to find warmth in stores. A day later, we were sweating. I love Seattle’s gradual weather changes.
- I finally found a bourbon to compete with my favorite Maker’s Mark: Old Forester Signature 100. The bartender at Gramercy Tavern recommended it. Cinnamon!
- The subway usually smells bad and is always dirty. London’s Underground is much less disgusting. The subway is also less reliable.
- NYC is loud! Trucks, people, construction noise, car horns. Even 25 flights up I was woken up by morning car-honking. Seattle is silent in comparison and a car horn deserves attention.
- It takes 30+ minutes to go anywhere, regardless of whether you walk, ride or take the train. It took us almost 3 hours to get to Coney Island, 20 miles away from our apartment. We can drive from Seattle to Portland in that time, 180 miles away!
I’ve been to New York a dozen times or so over the last 30 years. When I was 19/20 I thought it was amazing and even wanted to live there. At 49, it’s the most-visited place for me. It’s a great city and I’m glad the kids got to see it, which they really wanted to, but I don’t need to visit anymore. Instead, I need to continue checking new travel destinations off my list.
After pastries from the hotel cafe, we walked through Brooklyn to see the CJ Hendry Rorschach exhibit, which included a giant bouncy house (padded walls).
Then we met Eric for lunch at Watty & Meg, continued to Milk Bar for ice cream and then to Threes Brewery. Gay and Eric went to another art exhibit and out to dinner with college friends while I took the kids back to the hotel and later out for pizza dinner.
We had lunch at the old school (est. 1884) P.J. Clarke’s, I had a great club sandwich, and then another walk around Manhattan in the Rockefeller Center area. NYC is freezing cold today!
I had planned to do my 750th Peloton ride at the Peloton studio today. I reserved a bike with my favorite instructor but she canceled her class due to an injury. So we left our Manhattan apartment and went to our hotel in Brooklyn, 1 Hotel Brooklyn, for the last 2 nights.
Gay and I went out to dinner, alone for the second time this week, while the kids had room service at our hotel. We went to Celestine with a great view of the Manhattan skyline:
We went to the Guggenheim museum to see what some refer to as “modern art”, things that mean nothing, say nothing, and look like nothing.
At least the building was cool (that’s Havana and Eva way up there):
But there was at least some stuff pushed to the side that required the effort and skill of people such as Degas, Picasso and Kandinsky:
