Project 365: 03/07/09

Matt’s last full day in Chicago…chowing down on squid ink pasta.

Project 365: 03/06/09

Matt snapping some more photos around Chicago!

Project 365: 03/05/09

Matt in Chicago, Day Two.

He didn’t take a camera so he’s been taking snapshots with his phone and sending them to me :-) (I’ve never been to Chicago!)

Project 365: 03/04/09

Matt is at the Drosophila conference in Chicago! This is a picture at Millennium Park.

Project 365: 02/18/09-02/23/09

02/18/09

Waiting for the plane!

02/19/09

At Huntington Gardens in LA.

02/20/09

In San Diego at the Cabrillo National Monument with Matt’s parents.

02/21/09

Posed for a picture in Matt’s parents’ backyard before heading out to Vegas. The little lighthouse was a Christmas gift from us.

02/22/09

At the Mojave Desert for a friend’s wedding.

02/23/09

Hanging out in our swanky hotel room in Vegas. Our flight home was a few hours later.

Virgin America

We are back from our trip! (P365 pictures to follow)

We took Virgin America to LA on Wednesday. It just started flying in/out of Boston earlier this month. I wanted to blog about some of my thoughts about flying on Virgin America:

- The terminal that they fly out of in Logan only has two gates. Security was a breeze. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a newstand in the terminal, but luckily I bought my reading material (some magazines and a book) at Costco earlier that week. The only option for food was a Cosi. I got a tomato/pesto/mozzarella sandwich because I was starving.

- The flight attendants were surly!

- They were stingy with the beverages. Most airlines I fly on nowadays give you the whole can of Diet Coke, but here they fill the cup with ice and then pour probably 1/4 of a can in there.

- You can request more drinks (or snacks and meals for a fee) at your own leisure as opposed to waiting for the drink service cart. They have a little screen where you can order stuff. I ordered Diet Coke and chocolate chip cookies.

- The chocolate chip cookies were really good.

- The chocolate chip cookies were a total rip off, though. $3 for six itty bitty tiny cookies.

- The television didn’t work. They said the satellite was out. Movies cost at least $7, some more.

- I thought maybe they’d give us free movies to make up for the fact that the satellite was out. They didn’t.

- They had video games. It occupied my time for a little while!

- They had chat room for the plane passengers. Nobody else was in it. I kind of wanted to chat! It would also be fun to have a chat room with people on other flights!

- The seats were comfortable and clean.

- The safety instructions were in an amusing video.

Coming home we took United. After flying on Virgin, those old United planes seemed very shabby. We flew from Vegas to Chicago, then from Chicago to Boston. The plane for the second leg had 70s patterns on the seats. They DID give me the entire can of Diet Coke…ALTHOUGH, on the first leg of the flight, they gave me Diet Coke from Brazil called “COCA-COLA LIGHT.” It didn’t taste like my regular Diet Coke. The movies were also free on United.

Anyway, I’ll definitely take Virgin America again. It was certainly more comfortable than your average flight. I was disappointed that the TVs didn’t work and I thought the flight attendants could have been nicer, but all in all it was a good trip. I absolutely abhor flying, but Virgin made it a little better.

Krissy and Matt Take Europe!

It’s really going to happen! In the summer of 2009, we are going to Europe! I’ve never been to Europe and Matt has only been to Barcelona for a conference so he didn’t get to see much, so we’re extremely excited.

These are our tentative plans:

London: We’ll start off in London. We don’t plan to stay in London long because everything is so expensive there, but luckily we will have a place to stay.

Cluj, Romania: I thought it would be fun to visit Transylvania. I’m a pretty big fan of The Count from Sesame Street, so my desire to visit Transylvania likely stems from that. I really want to see castles. It’s not a very expensive place to stay in hotels and there are reasonably priced flights back around Europe.

Lussin, Croatia: My mom is from Lussin, a Dalmatian Island in the Adriatic. My nonna’s house is still in our family so we will have a place to stay. The majority of our trip will be spent here, lazing around the island, eating fish and cheese and figs, drinking wine, and swimming in the sea.

Trieste, Italy: It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump away from Lussin, so we plan to go there for a day or two.

Zagreb, Croatia: We will have to go home via Zagreb, so why not spend a few days there? After reading a bit about Zagreb on Wikitravel, I think it will be a fun place to spend some time there. Sounds like a fun city with some good nightlife and cuisine.

Another possibility is Venice, which is a ferry ride away from Lussin. Flights from Cluj land in Venice regularly, so we might spend a night in Venice…but probably just a night! We’re going to try to keep this trip as inexpensive as possible which is why we’re not going to places like Paris and Rome.

We’re very excited. The only real international travel we’ve done is to China. After Europe, the next continent we want to go to is South America. And once we have school-aged kids we want to do one of those family-oriented African safaris!

But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself. :-) We’re going to Europe next year…YAAAY!

Lighthouses and Newport, RI

My in-laws are in town, so we took a little weekend trip down to Newport, RI.

We did go to one of the mansions:

That was the Marble House, summer home of the Vanderbilts. We couldn’t take pictures inside, but MAN was it gaudy.

We also visited a variety of lighthouses:

There were also a few we couldn’t actually visit, but we did see them going over a bridge:

We’ve now seen eight lighthouses this year. Our goal is to visit 10 a year, so we have a little over 2 months to see two more.

Bloggy Blog Blog!

I’m sorry I haven’t been so bloggy lately! I was in California for 10 days to attend two weddings, and one was my sister’s!

That’s the fam :-)

Unfortunately, I had one of the worst colds EVER spanning half the trip!! I spent the duration of the wedding goofy on cough syrup. :-) The pain that I thought was a hernia returned after bouts of extreme coughing but it’s better again. We took the red-eye home on Sunday, arriving in Boston at 6:30 AM the following morning.

I spent Monday mostly on the couch, blowing my nose and watching television, trying to recuperate because TODAY I started a new job! I am now the Web Content Producer at Lasell College! It’s a 25 hour a week position, so I’ll still be freelancing about 15 hours a week from home. The position is super cool…I’ll be running around campus trying to find news and posting it on the website! AND, Lasell is ONE MILE from my house! So I walked today. (And it was a good thing I brought my umbrella because it was raining when I left today!)

So, as you can see, I am a busy bee these days. We’re even returning to California at the end of the month for Matt’s aunt’s birthday party…WOW!!! Hopefully another icky cold won’t happen during that trip because we’re taking another red eye home!

Honeymoon Pix!!

We’re back and we had a lovely time! Unfortunately our camera broke while we were on Assateague Island, so we had to use some CVS disposables for the rest of the trip. :-(

Some highlights:

Fenwick Island Lighthouse

Assateague Island Lighthouse

Astronaut Krissy at NASA on Wallop’s Island

Matt at the Mod Bar in Ocean City

We played mini golf FOUR times!!!

Pirate mini golf was our favorite.

Miniature horses in Assateague! The one with the white spots went RIGHT up to me.

After all you can eat seafood…and we ate a lot!

See the rest on Flickr!