I went to DC and Dan & Karla got hitched

So 2 weeks ago, I put Aviva and Soren on a plane to California, and then during the week I headed down to DC for the 12th annual International Symposium on Neurovirology. The impetus for this trip was Dan & Karla's wedding in Sacramento - we had all been waiting for this wedding for a while, and we weren't going to miss it. So we figured, get Soren another week with Bubbie and Zayde, get Aviva some help and avoid a 2 day trip to California with the baby.


After dropping Aviva off at the airport on Saturday afternoon - TSA was very nice to give me a gate pass so I could take Aviva and Soren up to the gate - I drove into to Brooklyn and went out for Koffmans birthday at a beer garden. I cannot drink beer like I used to. A single one liter stein gave me an almost instant hangover and a wicked headache.

Anyway, on Monday I headed down to DC with Cheo and Paul, one of his graduate students, and spent the night just across the river in the Crystal City area of Arlington. After a run near the monuments and dinner at McCormick & Schmidts, we got a good nights sleep and got up early to go for a ride around the monuments.

Nice ride, and DC really has a great bike share program and a beautiful set of bike paths. And the people there really seem to take advantage, there were lots and lots of people commuting to work by bike. The conference itself was great, got to meet a lot of new people, hear about some good science and had a pretty good poster session.

I also got to spend the evening with my friends Scott and Michele and their beautiful kids ... and I got to meet their newborn son Ridge for the first time.

 

And finally, I left the conference a bit early and flew out to California to meet up with Aviva and Soren for the wedding. Not seeing them for a week was really, really rough ... a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be, so I was really happy to see them. We stayed at the Sheraton Grand in Sacramento, and due to Sorens early rising coupled with daylight savings time resulted in Soren and I taking long walking tours around town each morning. 

And Saturday night was the main event, a fantastic wedding. Great food from Magpie (the pork shoulder and pork sandwiches were delicious), excellent wine and of course there were the fabulous Golden Lion dancers. Overall, a great night and a great, if not incredibly fast weekend.

Boothbay Harbor (and incidently, my birthday)

For my birthday this year we went to a wedding. On September 29th, one of Avivas good friends from the hospital that she worked at after RISD got married in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. As my birthday is the 30th, we happened to be in Maine on my birthday, and to celebrate, we ate a lot of good food and did a little hiking.

So on the way up to Maine, we stayed at our friends Ilana's parents house in Massachusetts. It is a beautiful house on a small lake, and in addition to being a gorgeous setting, staying there let us catch up with Ilana's parents, who we love. The next day, we stopped in Kittery for lunch and ate at Warrens lobster house - mmmm, super chowder (clams, lobster, crab, scallops) - and a single beer, which got me reasonably tipsy. Must be getting old.

Boothbay was beautiful, and while there for the wedding, we managed to get a hike in at a Oven's Mouth Preserve, a beautiful little preserve surrounded by an inlet in the interior of the peninsula.

We also ate well - ribs & chowder, lobster omelets, steamed lobster and the piece de resistance, lobster mac n' cheese. Cannot even tell you how fabulous this was, particularly after a rainy hike ... Mac n' cheese with ritz crackers and a whole lobster. Mmmmm .....  Oh, and the pound cake that Aviva baked and brought for my birthday.

And, almost as a sidenote (although that was the ostensible reason for the trip) the wedding was pretty awesome as well. Aviva signed the ketubah and we got to see a truly huge and joyous family get together.