We celebrated Halloween

Oct. 31 - Happy Halloween

We went to Serres Farm in Redmond to find our perfect pumpkins for carving. 

Mission accomplished!  David guessed the weight of his pumpkin closer than I did.  If they had used a decimal place, I'm sure I would have won.  David's was 14 pounds and mine was 13 pounds.

 

 

The finished products - ta-dah!  You can probably guess what one David did.  (He's so cute)

David ended up in NYC for a work conference over Halloween, so I headed over to LeeAnn's with my parents to celebrate with these crazy witches and cat boy.  Mom and dad stayed at home passing out candy while I tagged along for the trick-or-treating!  They were the best and gave me a couple Milky Ways from their bags. 

 

  

It was a Happy Halloween, until LeeAnn told Tate the next morning that she ate all his candy
(as a joke)!  Thanks uncle David for the great idea via Jimmy Kimmel. 

 

 

 

 

 



We learned to cook Italian.

Oct. 18

10 months later, we finally redeemed a Christmas present for an Italian cooking class at Al Boccalini's  in Seattle. Al didn't teach the class, but we saw him pass by during the class. His Italian accent was as thick as his Italian mustache. He said he, "lika the pasta right whennit comma outta the pot". He had a charisma and charm about him that said, "Put me on a reality tv show. People want to watch me. I'm ready."

The chefs-in-training:
My mom & dad
Uncle Mark
David & I
8 other people in the class

The menu:
Piadina - Italian flat bread topped with sautéed mushrooms and rosemary
Angel hair pasta in amatriciana sauce with pecorino romano cheese
Baby romaine salad topped with a red wine vinaigrette
Chicken scaloppini
Mixed berries with whipped cream and orange zest

David learning to make the Piadina.

Sautéing the onions for the pasta sauce.

Our instructor in the black shirt.  He liked the pop quiz way to teach. "Why do we stretch the dough?" *waits for everyone in the class to get it wrong* "Because of the gluten strands". There was a lot of waiting for wrong answers in this class. We don't know the difference between cheeses, that's why we're here.  He was not ready for a reality show.

Everyone got to help make the meal.

Finally, ready to eat.

In this last picture we were able to capture the meal, myself, David. We were also photo bombed by a thumb (which looks like a blazing sun entering the picture).  Thanks mom. :)

We had a fun time and a great meal!

We went cruisin' to New England

Oct. 5 - Oct. 12

Caribbean Princess, 7-Day Canada & New England

New York.  David and I took the red-eye from SEA to NY and landed at 6 am (I reaaallllly do not recommend red-eye flights).  Luckily, my parents arrived the night before and we took a shuttle to their hotel and got to sleep for a couple hours before we headed to the port.

Here's a picture of our boarding picture.  We don't ever buy those.

My sister Bonnie took a bus from DC and joined us on the cruise.

First stop, Newport, Rhode Island.  For $2/each we hopped on the city bus and got to see the mansions along the coast.  We got off the bus and took the Cliff Walk path back towards the ship...
in the rain.

Pictures don't do these houses justice.

We decided this will be our next house.  Something modest, not too flashy.

We got back to the tender station only to get stuck in the longest line waiting to get back on the ship. Luckily it had stopped raining by that point.

Boston, Massachusetts.  We took the city bus to the train into the main part of town.
We did our own walking tour since my parents and Bonnie had been there before.

Bar Harbor (aka "Bah Haabah"), Maine.  Voted our favorite port on the cruise!  David, Bonnie and I rented bicycles and biked through the closed (thanks to the government shutdown) National Acadia Park. We walked around the town to stretch out our legs and got some yummy hot chocolate from a place that was featured on the Today Show for their lobster ice-cream!

Saint John, New Brunswick.  We rented a car and drove out to the Bay of Fundy.  There are sea caves that you can only get to when the tide is out.  As we were leaving, we watched the tide start to come back in and in less than 30 minutes there was no access to the caves.

 

Tide coming back in.

There were flies all over the inside of the top of this lighthouse.

Halifax, Nova Scotia.  This is the area of land closest to where the Titanic sank and there is a cemetery to commemorate those who died out on the coast.  That was too far away, so we walked from the ship to Halifax's first cemetery.  The oldest grave identified is a child who died in 1721.  We also walked through some beautiful gardens and watched a crane nab a fish out of the pond, took a tour of The Fortress and walked along the boardwalk back to the ship.

 

 

While on the ship, we watched Movies Under the Stars...

Went hot tubing, played trivia, got chosen to be one of the couples on The Marriage Game (we did pretty well, but the couple married for 62 years won) and David tried out for Princess Pop Star.  He was selected to be a finalist after an awesome rendition of Back Street Boys, "I Want it That Way" and got robbed in the finals by being slated to sing first before everyone was in the room.  He sung Mack the Knife and was awesome.

Oh and we did some eating too.  Princess Love Boat Dream, delicious!

This will definitely not be our last cruise.

On our flight home we had a layover in SLC for a couple hours and David's family was
able to come up and visit for a bit. Thanks Keith, Kim, Calvin and Alisyn it was great to
see you even if for an hour.

Oh and look what else is also in the SLC airport.

Family and food, perfect ending to a great vacation.