An update - as requested by Ned.
And it's a non-hunting post. The deer aren't moving enough in all of this snow to justify putting the cameras out, so I need to talk about something else for a change.
Last weekend, the family took our first "vacation" together in a long time. We went to Boston for two days and over-nighted in a hotel. I'm going to blog our experiences to make sure we remember how it went when it comes time to planning our next trip.
First of all, it wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected and feared. However, my expectations were REALLY low to begin with.
The Car Ride
The kids loved the new portable cd players that I had bought them the day before. I wasn't even sure that they still made them, but they were only $18 at Bull Moose. I ripped their "new" Kidz Bop and Justin Bieber cds before the trip because I know it's just a matter of time before they destroy them. I know what you're thinking? CDs? Yeah - I'm cheap like that. I don't even let them get new CDs. Used ones have always been good enough for me, so I'm trying to instill some frugality into the kids, too. Besides, paying 6 whole dollars for a bunch of kids singing covers of awful pop tunes is bad enough. We have a dvd player for the car that we use on long rides to camp, but I wanted the kids to be looking outside. I may "forget" the dvd player this spring when we start going to camp again, too.
The Hotel
I have a bit of a hangup with hotels. If I think about the thousands of people who have slept in that bed and done god knows what... it just... blech... This one didn't have the nasty comforter, at least. The outer cover was a washable sheet over a thinner comforter, so that put me somewhat at ease. I did pull back the sheets from the mattress and looked for bed bug sign, though (it was clean). Starbucks in the lobby was nice. The pool was fine. Parking in the garage was expensive at $40, but it was conveniently located. We were just a block or so away from the Prudential building, which was also convenient. All in all, it could have been worse. The kids definitely liked it.
The Subway
Here's another thing that the kids enjoy a lot more than I do. I hate touching anything in the subway, particularly during cold and flu season. Come to think of it... I remember being pretty skeeved out in the sweaty summer time, too. On the way to the Boston Museum of Science, Angela and the kids sat next to a guy with the prototypical drunk's nose, and he was having a really rough morning by the looks of him. The kids didn't notice, though. They were loving the ride and kept wanting to stand up during it, but we explained how rude it would be to stand in front of their seats. The subway system is much nicer than it was years ago with the rechargable Charlie Card system. Being able to hand it back and forth over the gate makes it really convenient for people to share one. Having a pre-recorded, understandable voice announce your stops is so much better than having the driver mumble it into their mics, too.
The Science Museum
If you want your kids to learn something scientific, don't go here until they are... I don't know - high school age? They'll absorb way more useful information by watching a Mythbusters marathon. If you want your kids to run around mashing buttons and watching things light up, this place IS a decent choice. There are certainly safer places to do it, though, like the Audio/Video section of your local Best Buy or a video arcade, if you can still find one.
Question for the people that are bringing strollers into this place: what is wrong with you? It's hard enough to maneuver as it is and believe me - your baby is not learning a darn thing.
Maybe it isn't so hectic outside of school vacation week, but I felt like a bee in a hive. There's no way I would want to attempt that crowd with anything less than a 1:1 adult:child ratio. It was stressful enough keeping tabs on a single child.
The Aquarium
I enjoyed this one a lot more than the museum. Seeing live animals is more exciting than seeing dead ones (who knew?). Again, though, it was amazingly crowded and just to ramp up the child-tracking difficulty, it's also VERY dark. One thing that this place has in common with the Science Museum (and pretty much anything else like this) is that individual kids want to move through it at different paces. We had a 5 year old that wanted to just race along and try and keep up with her older cousins to get through it and on to the Gift Shop vs. an 8 year old that wants to see and learn about EVERYTHING. My older one was slowing the younger one down and was also mad because she was getting moved along too fast.
The Prudential Observatory
This was the cheapest AND best part of the whole trip. From the 50th floor of the Prudential Center, you can see ALL of Boston. Having the windows start at waist height makes a big difference with my fear of heights, and my legs only buckled when I looked straight down. The Penobscot Narrows Observatory has full-height windows and it makes me a lot more uncomfortable than this did. It's really an incredible view. Here again, though, we ran into the "different pace" issue. One child got thirsty and wanted to leave after 30 minutes, while the other one demanded to listen to EVERY piece of the audio tour (both the children's one AND the adult's one). We ended up staying up there for almost an hour and half.
Museum of Fine Arts
I thought that Angela had gotten Boston out of her system, but apparently not. She had purchased the City Pass, which granted access to the Museum of Fine Arts, too. On Friday, the girls finished school vacation by taking the Downeaster from Portland to Boston all by themselves to go to the Museum. She hates to take them both to Hannaford, so I was really impressed that she dared try and pull that off. By her account, the kids were GREAT the whole day and they had an excellent time. Until... the trip home. Angela couldn't get on the train she wanted because it sold out, got a migraine, was pestered by a bratty 10 year old boy, hit a delay in Saco, got into Portland having not eaten dinner and all the fast food places had shut down early because of the storm. The roads were pretty slippery, too.
Nosh
This past weekend, we had a late Valentine's "double date night" with my sister and brother-in-law. We had tickets for Flogging Molly at the State theater and went to Nosh for dinner. Nosh was featured on Man Vs Food a few months ago. It's been a trendy place in Portland lately, so I was pleasantly surprised that it didn't match my preconceived conceptions of what "hipsters" were in to these days. We were surprised at how meaty and affordable the place was. Ritchie and I had the Nosh Burgers, which were great - pork/beef patties, garlic jelly, blue cheese, bacon and egg. Karen had what was basically a giant fancy ham-and-egg breakfast sandwich covered with white sauce. Ang struggled to find something vegetarian, but settled for Ham and Lentil Soup (it had loads of ham) and fried pickles. The pickles were huge spears in tempura - not at all like the usual deep-fried slices we'd seen. We all got some kind of fries, too. The most unique were the "bacon-dusted fries". They seemed to have run bacon through a food processor until it was a very fine dust and then covered the fries with it. Pretty awesome.
flan
After dinner, we found out what time Flogging Molly would be going on and discovered that we still had some time to kill. We headed across the street to get some flan. I'm not even going to say where we got the flan, because it was not good. It was edible, but it was not flan-like. I had a bad feeling when I saw all the whipped cream and the little air pockets. It was very spongy. I wonder if they were using some recipe that had flour in it or something. I have decided that I will be doing some flan experiments in the kitchen in the near future, just to purge the memory of it.
Flogging Molly
The State is an amazing venue to see a "quiet" show, like Ben Folds solo. It's an awful place to see a "loud" show, like the Dropkick Murphys (new album tomorrow, by the way...). Flogging Molly skews "loud", so the sound quality was not great. The violin did manage to cut through the muddle, but the vocals were hard to discern. That's a shame, because Dave King's voice is my favorite part of the band's sound. The house was packed and the crowd was really animated and singing along. The band played for over two hours. Lots of stage banter. Great show!
TTFN
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