travel
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team gentino.
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breakfast date at pike place.
Yesterday morning David and I caught the bus to the center of downtown for breakfast at Pike Place, the sprawling fish/farmer’s market right on the water. It was still a little drizzly, but crowds gather early even on a weekday, an endless push of people from all over the world snapping iPhone photos of the fish tossing and the original Starbucks coffee shop. David and I poked around the stalls, admired the rows and rows of fresh fruit and flowers, and ate way too much food. Sourdough cinnamon rolls, smoked salmon eggs benedict at Lowell’s Restaurant (we highly recommend), a chocolate macaron, and cups of fresh honey-sweetened greek yogurt. Later on we walked down…
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aquarium.
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seattle.
This summer our family of four is taking our first ever Genuine Vacation. By that I mean, it’s not connected to an event or fund-raising or a conference or any other trip. Nope. This time we made our plans and talked to David’s aunts and cousin, and chose our dates, and bought plane tickets for Seattle. Just because we wanted to. David’s dad’s sisters, Cathy and Pat, live here on the same street in Ballard, a neighborhood in downtown Seattle. Cathy’s daughter Annie is 15. They’ve made a whole lot of trips to the East Coast over the years to see the Gentino clan, and we’ve always wanted to come to hang out…
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barnwell.
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ten years.
David and I spent this past week on a mountain outside of Flat Rock, North Carolina, celebrating ten years of marriage. Wait — did you hear that? A week. Six nights. Just us. We haven’t taken a vacation of this length since our honeymoon in Barbados, ten years ago to this day. Not with kids, not without kids. How can that be? It was never our intent to wait this long for a whole-week getaway, but life just happened. You know how it goes. At first we never had money or vacation days, and then kids came along and we used up our babysitting offers for support raising and vision trips and…
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anniversary week.
We spent the week in the Blue Ridge Cabin, and we loved it. It was cozy and comfortable and the way it was perched up on the mountain in a swath of leafy trees made me feel like we were in a treehouse. DuPont State Forest was a few miles away and we went nearly every day for hikes, once together but mostly parting ways. David loved the big, long trails but my favorite thing was hiking down to Triple Falls with a book to sit and soak in the sun. We spent our first afternoon of vacation on the Eating Asheville walking food tour (Asheville was about 50 minutes’ drive from our cabin). We’ve never done something like…
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lindsey’s wedding.
If it seems like we just went to Florida for my cousin’s wedding, we did! Brad got married January 31st, and his sister Lindsey got married on Saturday. The kids and I were super bummed David couldn’t come along this time, but we had a great time road-tripping with Kenny and Shari and the boys. If you’ll excuse the grainy phone pics, I’ll tell you about our weekend! Here we are packed in the van. We couldn’t fit three kids’ seats in the way way back like we hoped, so Shari and I took turns (although she graciously took much longer turns because of my propensity toward carsickness). Favorite movies…
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03.13.14.
We spent four quiet, peaceful days at the top of a mountain this week. A friend offered us his family’s mountain home and we’ve had this little trip planned for a couple months. David and I didn’t realize how badly we needed a getaway until Monday morning. We were so tired and our heads were spinning with a whole lot of things to process from the last few weeks. The week was very, very restful. It was over 70 degrees when we arrived Monday afternoon and there was snow today when we left. Bizarre. The four of us slept a lot, talked, read books, watched the Food Network, hiked and…
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03.12.14.