Austin and Anniversary

Pictures, in reverse order from how they happened, of course.  For full albums, check out my Facebook page (but you have to "friend" me to see it).  In any case, the bottom picture is from my day at the Norwich Spa, when I relaxed and my hair did too.  Then some highlights from my trip to Austin, TX, when I visited Shira and Nathaniel.  It was very cool to be at the Whole Foods Headquarters and nice to eat at restaurants where I felt the food was really gluten-free.  The top two pics are from our anniversary - Adam and I just got back from Newport, RI.  We stayed at a lovely B&B where the room was nice, very warm, and the innkeeper was nice, very warm, and a bit of a helicopter chef (as in, she hovered on top of us while we ate breakfast!). But that's OK b/c she made good food and understood my GF needs so that's good.  On Monday night we walked around and found a nice restaurant right on the water. Turns out it was restaurant week in Newport so there were great deals! The first day we sat at breakfast until almost 11 AM because there was a nice couple from New York and we were just chatting forever. But I managed to get through the entire time there without letting anyone know what I do for a living - that made the conversations much easier!   We started our big day of touring on Tuesday by trying to go to the Touro Synagogue only to find out that they had just closed it the day before for months of construction! Oh well, next time I guess.  We spent the morning walking around the shops etc, and then went to the Breakers for a tour (of course realizing we left the free tickets at home in Hartford!). The Breakers tour was nice but the guide was rather boring and uninterested.  That's OK. We were still impressed with the magnitude and beauty of it all.  We went back to wandering around downtown and then went to the Opera House for an afternoon movie.  We saw "Rachel Getting Married" which we thought would be cool to watch on our anniversary. Let me make this very clear: it was the worst movie we'd ever seen!  Only watch it if you really enjoy being seasick.  It was so disturbing and actually made me want to puke!  Actually, the shaky camera aside, it was...........no, it was horrible! If you've seen it, I'd love to hear your opinion. I don't need every movie to have a happy ending - just SOME ENDING. It was lame. But it got us really talking about life and resolution, and how even if the resolution is bad, at least there's something. This movie just turned over a million stones but didn't follow any of them through.  Everything, and I mean everything, was left up in the air. It could have gone in a lot of wonderful directions, instead it just went down the drain. But anyway, as you can see, I'm not too annoyed that I spent several hours in an unheated slanting opera house watching the world through a shaky camera. :)

Tuesday night we wandered for a long time before finding dinner.  We finally ended up at a diner-type place that served amazing fish. Wednesday we took a beautiful walk on the Cliff Walk and then drove home. It was just so wonderful to be away!  Happy Anniversary to us!  Tonight we watched about 25 minutes of our wedding DVD (just the highlights, none of the embarrassing moments) and soon we'll eat our wedding chocolate (we didn't have a wedding cake, but we gave out chocolates, so we've been saving some for our anniversary, but were too stuffed last night).  Looking forward to the next many, many anniversaries!