I owe you big time!

I have 3 consecutive blogs ready to go to make up for not posting for 2 + weeks!

Hello there blogland. I’m so sorry for the delay in posting. I have been very busy and I think it’s time for an update. Since you last heard from me, Taylor and I have traveled to New England to see Joel McHale perform in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire (my first time in New Hampshire!) and then to my home turf of Ohio/Michigan for a week of fun and not-so-fun times. We came home for 2 reasons, the annual Lucyk (well, actually Rothermel/Pavlak) family reunion and a much, anticipated court case resulting from a “car accident” I was in in June 2006. You read that right, June 2006.

I’ll break this up a little just to keep from information overload. So here’s the story of the trip to Hampton Beach to start.

Taylor and I left New York on Thursday, July 9. My company has its main offices in Cambridge , Massachusetts, which is near Boston and is much closer to where we were heading for the weekend. So, rather than battle traffic leaving NYC on Friday, we left Thursday and I arranged to work from our Cambridge office on Friday.

We got up to the Boston area at about 9:30pm and stayed with some family friends of Taylor. They were very nice to let us crash with them at the last minute. On Friday morning, I actually took the train in to Cambridge with the husband. I worked on Friday. It was a very quiet day at the office. So quiet, in fact, that I left at 3:30pm. Taylor didn’t have to work, so he had spent the day just hanging out. He went to visit his Oma (Dutch for Grandma) who is in failing health at her nursing home. Then he came and met me. We had some time to kill so we actually went to HomeGoods (yes, the home furnishing store. I know, exciting). We bought a rug that ended up being too small for our apartment and we’ll have to sell it and also a cabinet for our bathroom which is perfect.

After HomeGoods, we met up with a friend of Taylor’s for dinner. I had requested seafood and he tried to take us down near the harbor in Boston, but it turned out that there was some big ship fair thingy in Boston, so every restaurant had like a 2 hour wait. We just went back inland a little and grabbed dinner at a Legal Seafood, which was actually really good for a chain. Then we headed out to where we had reserved a hotel for the weekend in Tewksbury, MA. I found the hotel on Hotwire for $45/night. It was a holiday in, but it was actually quite nice!
On Saturday, we got up and went for a 6 mile run. I haven’t really mentioned this (because it hasn’t fully registered with me yet…) but Taylor and I are running the New York City Half Marathon on August 16th. So we’re trying to force ourselves to do some significant running. It’s been hard, but I think we’ll do ok

After our run, we got dressed in some beachy clothes, packed a bag, and headed to Hampton Beach, NH for the concert that evening. We stopped at a couple HomeGoods along the way (Taylor is SUCH a good sport) and eventually made it to the beach at around 3pm. Unfortunately, there was some RIDICULOUS traffic getting into the actual city of Hampton Beach, but we eventually were out of the care at about 4:30 or so. The show was at 8pm so we took some time to walk around and eventually stopped at a little beachside restaurant with outdoor seating upstairs and some live music. We got a pretty good dinner and headed toward the Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom.

Now, there’s not actually a casino in Hampton Beach, it’s more like a large arcade along the beach. Before we headed into the actual ballroom, we spent $5 in the arcade. We played some skee-ball (I am the hands-down better skee- ball player of the 2 of us), guitar hero, basketball, and even got some of those strips of photos from a photo booth. They are pretty darn cute, I must say! Taylor actually bought a frame and put some of them in one for me for my birthday
We went to the show, which was really good. I like Joel more as the host of E!’s the Soup than as a standup comic, but it was still good. After the show, we headed back to our hotel and the next day we pretty much just drove back to the NYC area (stopping at Friendly’s and HomeGoods along the way).