Or came to visit - I am woefully behind in blog-updating department. A few weeks ago our friend Rebecca, who lived in the building next to ours in Salt Lake, and who we stay with when we visit Hawaii, came to NJ to visit us. She was on the east coast for not quite a week, and two of those days she spent in Delaware with her family, and we still managed to do a whole bunch of stuff. Oh, and that fish picture was from one of the NYC subway stations.
Without doing a complete play-by-play, we had a lot of fun. The first two days (Tuesday and Wednesday) Rebecca and I took the train into NYC and visited with another of her friends who also used to live in Hawaii, Erin. I think Rebecca's favorite activity of those two days was giving away coupons from our Entertainment Books to random people on the street. While in the city we also visited the International Center of Photography Museum, had lunch twice at two different locations of Havana Central (we had coupons), had egg creams at Katz's deli, walked Erin's dogs along the promenade in Brooklyn, spent an afternoon in a lesbian bar (which didn't seem to have any lesbians in it), ate Thai food (no coupons), ate ice cream (coupons), and gave away some more coupons.
Thursday we spent in NJ since we planned to drive down to Atlantic City in the evening. Rebecca loves to discount shop, and in Hawaii her favorite favorite favorite store to go to is Ross Dress for Less. We don't have a Ross near us, so I took Rebecca on a tour of other discount stores in the area like Marshall's, TJ Maxx, Daffy's, Loehmann's, Annie Sez, and I forget where else.
We finished shopping, Kenji came home from work, and we all packed for the weekend, hopped in the car and headed for the Tropicana hotel in Atlantic City. The reason we went there was that it just so happened that Rebecca's good friend from Germany, Stephan, was in Atlantic City on business. So we had a nice meal with him on Thursday night and we had lunch together on Friday.
During dinner on Thursday we learned from our waiter that there's a Ross near Atlantic City. So guess what we did on Friday while we were on our way to drop Rebecca off at her brother's in Delaware? I bet you can't guess. ;)
While Rebecca spent time with her folks in Delaware, Kenji and I continued on to go stay in Chesapeake City. This time we tried staying at the Blue Max Inn. It was quite nice - the room was larger than the one we stayed in the last two times at the Inn at the Canal. Breakfast was quite yummy, and they have a pirate guy hanging up from the second floor out in front.
On Saturday Kenji and I spent the afternoon in Annapolis, MD, mostly hunting for letterboxes. There was a series of boxes we hunted for in a park - we found four of the seven we were after. One box we found the location of but didn't manage to spot the box, and there were two more that we likely would have gotten but there were too many people around watching us, and we didn't want to risk giving away the location of the boxes. Along the way we found a basketball next to an empty basketball court, so we tried shooting some baskets.
When we were done with Annapolis, we drove to a Metro station on the Beltway and hopped on a train that took us to the new Nationals baseball stadium to see them play against the Texas Rangers. We rooted for the red team (the Nationals) but they pretty much got creamed by the Rangers. Oh well I guess we're pretty much used to that - that is, rooting for the losing team.
On Sunday, Rebecca and her brother, sister-in-law and parents all came down to Chesapeake City so we all walked around for a couple hours before heading back up to NJ. It was a really hot day so when we weren't ducking into shops for the air conditioning, we were sitting in the shade out of the sun. While we were sitting in the shade, we spotted a guy riding around on a really old-time bicycle. I don't know how he gets up on that thing, but he rode past us a couple of times anyway. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera or phone immediately handy, so this was the best picture I was able to get of him.
Rebecca took this picture of us with the Cheseapeake City bridge in the background. All the nice quality picutres in this post of course came from her camera. :)
So you'd think we had enough fun already but after driving the 120 or so miles home, Rebecca and I had one more adventure to partake in. One of my swing dancing friends, Denise, had her 40th birthday in June. So her mom threw a party for her at a restaurant only about a mile away from our house. She hired the Gas House Gorillas to play, and pretty much all of my NJ swing dancing friends were there. I think Rebecca had the most fun making up stories about me and her to all my friends. Something about the two of us being sisters born in Massachusetts and that she was naughty so our parents sent her away to boarding school in Wisconsin and who knows what else.
Last Sunday Kenji and I drove out to Frenchtown and rented innertubes from Delaware River Tubing for a nice relaxing five mile float down the Delaware.
We never found the letterbox, but we did find the Hot Dog Man. Of course he's impossible to miss as that's where hundreds of other tubers, kayakers, rafters and canoers all stop for their lunches. Kenji and I each had a cheeseburger, a lemonade and a bag of chips.
