CT Staycation

We got a two week summer break this year - no classes and no clinicals for TWO WHOLE WEEKS! I didn't know it was physically possible to sleep so much. I spent the first week just re-charging my batteries up at Chuck's and then the first weekend Chuck and I drove down to the city for Katie and Sheldon's wedding! Alas, I did not bring my camera so that is a link to the wedding photographer's blog. I do however have two pictures of Katie and Sheldon from their honeymoon trip to Roma:

The wedding weekend was made even more memorable because it coincided with Hurricane Irene in NYC - what are the odds? We were lucky, most of the guests were still able to get in and get out with relative ease and now Katie and Sheldon have a pretty great wedding story to tell. After the wedding Chuck and I headed back up to Connecticut for a week long stay-cation. Chuck had the week off and while there was a fair amount of sleeping in and watching Mad Men going on we did manage to get out and about a bit! We went to see an Heirlooms concert! (the first picture)

The Heirlooms are a band and one of its members is Ciara Cohen. Ciara's husband, Alex Cohen, is what Chuck refers to as a "next-gen" which means that Alex's dad (like Chuck's dad) owns a ShopRite making Alex a 'next-generation' owner! We have had a couple of awesome dinners with Alex and Ciara (the Cohen's have a store in East Hartford). They are our age, Alex works for his dad and Ciara is a middle school music teacher (who is also in a really awesome band). They just got a dog and named him Sirius Black - I am obviously insanely jealous.

We spent an afternoon learning how to stand-up paddle (or SUP) on the Farmington River (the second picture). We first saw people doing this in Manhattan Beach and then we tried to rent some paddle boards in Cabo this year but that didn't work out so when I saw the local canoe and kayak shop advertising a free SUP lesson we jumped at the chance! We spent an evening working the ShopRite tent at a local outdoor summer movie series selling drinks and snacks to the movie-goers (the third picture, this is Chuck and his mom). All the proceeds went to ShopRite's charity Partners in Caring.

We spent an afternoon hiking to Campbell Falls (the fourth picture) and then searching for a geocache! Geocaching has been described as "a game of high tech hide-and-seek." I first learned about geocaching when I was at UF. I was running through a park on campus on an elevated boardwalk. A hurricane had just come through and a big cyprus tree had fallen over in the storm and the root system had pulled up part of the boardwalk.

I was trying to find my way around the messed up portion of the boardwalk when I spotted a container. It would have been under the boardwalk (I would never have seen it) if the falling tree hadn't exposed it. When I opened it up I found a note that said "Congratulations! You found it!" and a log book with all of these entries of people who had found the cache before me. There was a website listed for anyone who had found the container in error so I went and that is how I learned about geocaching. Basically, someone posts coordinates of a 'cache' online and then you are supposed to use a GPS to find it. The cache can be anywhere and now, since most smartphones have GPS, pretty much anyone can play. It basically turns any walk or hike into a treasure hunt :)

The iPhone isn't the most ideal device for geocaching since it doesn't always get great service. For example, while we were trying to find this cache, one minute my phone would tell me we were 14 feet away and then the app would re-load and it would tell me we were over a mile away - very frustrating. I was ready to give up and go home when Chuck found it! The last picture is of him with the cache (the tiny gray container hidden in the rocks). After reading back over this post I can see why I don't feel quite as rested as I should after such a long break!