Orlando or Bust!

February 27th- March 1st

It has been a really cold and snowy February. Too cold to even go out and go sledding so we did the next best thing. We got in the car and just drove south to Florida. By Friday at lunch, we had made it to Amelia Island to grab some lunch and check out the town.

We found this fantastic little Cuban Restaurant, Hola!, had some time to walk around and find a unique ice cream shoppe, DeNucci's, before continuing our drive south.

We made it to our final destination for the evening, in Orlando around dinner time. We meet up with our friends, Jackie & Evan for the night. We had a great time catching up with them and just hanging out.

On Saturday morning, we had to say good bye to Jackie & Evan and headed over to meet up with Jimmy & Kim. We spent the afternoon at the UCF basketball game.

They gave us a driving tour of campus since it was a rainy day before we headed to a late lunch at Jimmy Hula's. This place was really good!

We spent the late afternoon headed to Blue Springs State Park to check out manatee's in the wild.

Oh my gosh, they are soo cool!! I think I could have sat and watched for hours. They are fascinating to me.

That evening we headed to dinner at Black Hammock Restaurant before calling it a night.

It was a super quick trip to Florida and on Sunday morning it was time to start the drive home. The trip home was pretty uneventful. We made one stop in Columbia, SC at a coffee shoppe called Cool Beans to hang out and catch up with one last friend, Sam.

It was a blur of a trip but we were so excited to get out and on the road again. We will definitely have to head back down to FL again this summer and spent more time with everyone and maybe see a beach or two. 

CHOCOLATE!!

February 7th

Jed & I haven't been on too many adventures in 2015 so when I found a Chocolate 5K, it was something that we NEEDED to do. It is always difficult to stay motivated to workout when there is freezing outside. If a random road trip to Durham and chocolate doesn't get us motivated, nothing will. So Friday night we headed down to Durham and found a fun new Italian restaurant, Pizzeria Toro to "carb load".

This place was a lot fancier then we realized but we had a great time and great food with 15 of our new closest friends.

Saturday morning we headed out to the race to pick up our starting chocolate before running 3.1 miles for more chocolate.

It was a super fun race and our friends Terri & Holly came out to cheer us on.

We ended the race with chocolate EVERYWHERE. I don't think people in Durham found us funny at all but we thought it was hilarious!

Best post game loot ever!

This stuff was amazing! I wanted to take it all.

Our trip to Durham was quick. Immediately after the race we hopped back in the car to meet friends in Blacksburg for there first Hokie basketball game! The Hokies couldn't pull of the win in the end but it was fun to introduce Hokie basketball to new little Hokie fans.

Planes, Trains & Spaceships

January 9th-11th

We didn't get a lot of time to hang out with friends that live in DC while we were up there for the Bowl Game, so we decided we would head back up there for a weekend to hangout and watch playoff football.

Most of our time we hung out in the house with sports on the tv but we did go on one adventure that I wanted to make sure I documented on the blog. On Saturday afternoon we went to Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center. This museum has to be linked to the Air & Space museum. It was amazing! We have been to the Air & Space museum in DC before. It has lots of cool stuff and a ton of people. This place was a little out of the way, way less crowds and a lot of historic and unique planes, including the Discovery Space shuttle.

We spent the beginning part of the day hanging out in the Observation Tower listening to live air traffic control & watching planes land at Dulles Airport.

The rest of the afternoon, we walked around the hangar's checking out a lot of different planes.

There was even an airplane making class and competition that we were able to participate in!

It was a great visit with friends and we can't wait to see them again soon.

Military Bowl (Part 2)

December 26-27th

On the 26th, Jed was able to take most of the day to relax and do whatever. There was a museum just down the street that we really wanted to go and check out called the Newseum. Tom, Derley and Brian joined us in our trip to the museum.

We could spent days in this museum, it was fantastic! I would definitely recommend it to anyone. So great. Some of the highlights for me were, the Berlin Wall display, the indescribable exhibits of September 11th and the heartbreaking feelings we felt when seeing April 16th information throughout the museum.

Truck full of bullet holes while traveling in "enemy territory"

Multicultural exhibit 

Berlin Wall Sign

Part of the Berlin Wall

It was truly amazing the see the artifacts they had in the museum, many were pretty surreal.

Very top of one of the World Trade Center Buildings

Front Page Newspapers for all over the world on September 12

Cameras from a journalist who lost his life while covering September 11th

We left the museum in the afternoon to meet up with my family where they got into town. They meet us at the National Trees so we could walk around the area for the afternoon.

It was great to get to see them before game day and explore the city a little before they needed to headed to there hotel for the evening.

That night Jed and I found a South African restaurant called Nando's that we checked out before meeting up with a group of friends then headed across the street from out hotel to the DC Improv. One of our friends just so happened to be performing that evening and we were able to go at catch the act.

Laura did a fantastic job and it was so fun to see her and watch her performance.
After the show, Nolan, Tyroid, Viceroy, Juan, Jed and I headed out to get a late night snack or two.

We found Julia's Empanadas before headed down to Krispy Kreme for hot doughnuts. Did you know some of the students had never experienced hot doughnuts! We had to fix that pronto!

The 27th was game day and it started EARLY. Derley and I joined a group super early to go put pom poms out in the stands of the stadium. We had a great time being there early and watching everything start to happen for the game. And the pom pom's looked great.

 Once we finished with all the pom poms it was time to wander through all the pregame festivities. We meet up with my family and explored the group tailgating area.

Before long, it was time to head into the stadium for the game. The game was great! The Military Bowl did a great job putting on this bowl game and game time was no exception. And it didn't hurt that we won the game 33-17.

Only 8 more months until the next season!