Category Archives: Trips

Costa Rica and wedding’d

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We successfully made it to Costa Rica and back, and overall it was a good trip, even if it was entirely less than ideal.

Ever since we started planning this trip out (for Mars’ wedding), we’ve both just been entirely unenthused about going. It lined up terribly with work obligations for both of us, flight times were horrific, and Costa Rica has never been a place that came up on our radars as a place we wanted to go. Also mosquitos and bugs generally love me, and I was not looking forward to dealing with that. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we could make the trip work, and generally being unhappy about even going.

The first two nights were worse than expected: Our flight left at 6 AM, so we went to a hotel by the airport the night before (Tuesday night) to spend the night. But because of the way their airport shuttle worked, we had to catch it at 3:30 AM, which meant we got less than 4 hours of sleep. Then we flew most of Friday, got there, checked in to our room, and were miserable the rest of the day… an attempt at dinner nearly resulted in vomiting in the restaurant (I guess from exhaustion and such), and we probably collapsed into bed around 8 and just slept.
(4 AM airport = sadness.)

The first real day at the resort (Thursday, by this point) was spent not really doing anything, and it was actually perfect that way. The place is situated in the “cloud forest”, which means it’s in the middle of plants and greenery and general naturey awesomeness. We walked the nature trails they had, watched (and photographed) hummingbirds, milked their cows, explored their church and greenhouse, and sat with books on benches overlooking the beautiful views around. It kind of forced us to disconnect from technology and just enjoy where we were, and that’s something I should do more often. Also the forced break from work, with the lack of laptops and cell phone service, was exactly what we needed.





The second day we booked a tour to actually get to see *some* of the country before we left. They took us to a coffee plantation in Naranjo, Sarchi to see them build and maintain the iconic oxcarts, and a farmer’s market in San Ramon. Most of the almost 6 hours was spent driving, and it’s interesting to see how long it takes to get anywhere, even if stuff isn’t really all that far. (For example, from the main road to the resort is 9km, but it takes 30-40 minutes to drive that because of the quality of the road.) But it was a really good tour (particularly the coffee tour), and makes me wish I’d stayed for the longer tour this week. That evening, Keith, Ian, and Al-Tim got in and we met up for dinner.




Saturday was the wedding. We met up with Keith, Ian, and Al-Tim for breakfast and did all the resort stuff again: milked the cows, walked the trails, watched the hummingbirds, and played some pool in the game room.


The wedding itself was in the afternoon, and was beautiful. (Also led by our friend Jason from undergrad, who is now a Catholic priest.) It was the first mass I’ve been to (I guess this was specifically a wedding mass), and it was nice. The reception had tasty food and good company, and the evening generally had fireworks everywhere (some smaller stuff when Mars and Dan exited the chapel and during their first dance, and a full fireworks display at the end of the evening). I guess that’s a Costa Rican thing? The first dance fireworks were probably the most unexpected, but the full display at the end was really long and pretty.




So yeah. In the end, I think I’m really glad I made it out for the wedding, although I still think I would have skipped the trip had it been anything less important. The country is beautiful, but the travel involved around it is hellish. So I’m really wishing I could have made the tour work, because that travel for a week and a half would have been much more worthwhile.

Photos of general things and the wedding are on my photos site, as usual.

Other random awesome things from the trip:
The sun is almost directly overhead a little before noon, resulting in the smallest shadows we’ve ever experienced.

There are beetles that look like they’re made of solid gold. The front desk guys showed us one and we thought they were trying to sell us some jewelry or something at first.

There are bugs everywhere. During the wedding, a cicada flew into the floating candle at our table, snuffed it out, and got trapped in the hardened wax. It was actually rather beautiful (and complimented the table decorations well), but kind of sad. (Keith commented that he kicked a beetle at one point, which is not a comment you’d normally expect to hear until you realize how big they can get here.)

The road to the resort was, as mentioned, almost a dirt road. Also there are remarkably few traffic lights in the cities (although they do seem to like speed bumps, and the drivers take those very seriously). Makes me glad we had chartered vans everywhere. Never try to drive in Costa Rica, I guess?

This is the new year

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It’s 2016! life‘s photojournal and stats pages have both been updated.

Hard to believe that it was an entire year ago that we sat in the living room drinking champagne out of reindeer cups to celebrate the new year. Seems like only a few months ago.

It’s been rather a crazy year. We went to 4 weddings this year, including our own (which we also spent most of the beginning of the year planning) and bought a house, and had various work changes and turmoil. I visited HQ three times (I think a new record for me?), spent an extended period of time with my parents, and bought my first mattress. I was also away from Pittsburgh for nearly all of December, which was its own bit of fun.

I spent the first week of the month in San Francisco for work, followed by a Phoenix trip, which was good. I stayed 2.5 weeks in Phoenix to try and see some high school people before Christmas, and it worked out somewhat? Got to see Pat, Vicki, and David, at least. (Also got to see Jennie and Schmiddy, which was less planned, but still awesome.)








More photos are at photos.

This past week has also been really hectic. We had a car for the week, so we went to all the places we couldn’t normally get to to buy things we couldn’t normally carry. Unfortunately, a lot of stuff didn’t go as expected. Ikea was sold out of the chairs we wanted, and wasn’t going to get more until tomorrow (Saturday), and the car was due back yesterday. Costco also had a couch we wanted, but we’d have no way to get it back other than renting a U-Haul, so we’re looking into other options that include shipping. Also generally we didn’t get as much cleaning done in the house as we would have liked, but that’s the way it goes?

Yesterday evening Akiva hosted a New Year’s party at William’s house (while William was out of town, which was rather amusing). It was nice having people to celebrate with.

The house is nearing move-in condition. We’ve cleaned almost all of the first-floor rooms and will continue trying to find furniture to fill them. We built the Ikea table and Target storage cubes we bought and put them in the appropriate rooms, and it’s nice to start having furniture. I think at this point we just need a bed frame for the mattress, and to clean the kitchen out so it’s usable, and it’s technically ready for us. Woo.

San Francisco, House!!!

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I had a trip to San Francisco, with the usual week in Phoenix afterward. It was a nice trip.

The flight out connected through Dallas. Apparently it was the first Pittsburgh-to-Dallas direct flight (after the Wright Amendment expired and let Southwest fly the route direct), so Southwest did their usual awesomeness and decorated the gate, and handed out Texas-shaped cookies to everyone:

The trip itself involved the usual meeting up with people, and also an unusually high number of meetings. I was going from meeting to meeting to meeting most days, with a small break for lunch (with team members). But I think we got a lot of planning done, which was the entire point of the trip, so that was great.



Also there were randomly puppies at work one day, so that was cute.

The San Francisco to Phoenix leg of the flight hit a snag though. Apparently Las Vegas was having lots of rain and flooding and unhappiness, so the flight was delayed more than 5 hours. So that was fun. Vegas seems to always cause problems… the delay brought back unhappy memories of being stuck in Vegas for 12 hours.

More photos of the trip are here and here.

In any case, the big happy news is that we probably have a house! Our offer was accepted this evening on an awesome 5-bedroom house a couple blocks from where we live now, so assuming the inspection doesn’t turn up terribleness… we have a house!

This makes two houses that we’ve made offers on while I was not in Pittsburgh. At least this one didn’t involve trying to sign legal paperwork while boarding a plane and while on the BART from the airport…

Honeymooooon

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We had a honeymoon! We went to the UK and France! It was pretty amazing! (Though the best part was probably being totally disconnected from the internet and email for 11 days.) A ton of photos from it are posted at photos and my photo journal has been updated as well.

We made stops in Manchester, London, Grenoble, and Paris. We walked a lot (didn’t really take public transit, other than long distance trains, in Manchester and London), and hiked a couple of days, and saw all sorts of awesome things and places. It’s going to be so weird having to return to work now.

We flew out Monday, April 20 from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia to Manchester, landing on Tuesday after not having slept much due to a crying baby on the plane. The Manchester airport was really nice… not too busy, and reasonably easy to get through. From there it was a train in to the city and our hotel to drop off our bags, and then a tram over to Media City UK to watch some filming of the TV game show Countdown. It was pretty awesome to see a rather behind-the-scenes look at how game shows are made. (Due to the reportedly strict “no cameras” policy, we didn’t bring along any, and therefore missed photo opportunities with the hosts at the end. Oh well. At least we got Rachel Riley’s autograph. :D)

Wednesday was spent hiking in the peak district up by Hathersage, reached by train. It was really beautiful up there.

Thursday was spent wandering the city, seeing the Museum of Science and Industry, and the John Rylands Library.

Friday we hopped on the train down to London, then did some exploring of the British Museum, which was conveniently open late for Friday.

Saturday we spent wandering through Hyde Park and visiting a couple of museums in Kensington: the Victoria and Albert museum and the Natural History museum.


Sunday we took a train to Oxford and wandered to see the universities and explore the area.

Monday we spent wandering London itself to do the “touristy” things, walking from our hotel at King’s Cross to the Twinings tea shop (of course), around to see the National Gallery, Buckingham Palace, and Big Ben/The London Eye, then over to see Tower Bridge and the Tower of London.
Here’s our entire route for the day. It felt like the most walking we’d done, although the peak district hiking the previous Wednesday apparently was a bit longer (see below).



Tuesday we took the Eurostar to Paris, then a train to Grenoble.

Wednesday we spent hiking the mountains around Grenoble.

Thursday we spent travelling back to Paris on the TGV, then seeing the Musee d’Orsay.

Friday we flew home via Charlotte.

Overall I found that European public transit is awesome, albeit a little expensive to take regularly. But all of the UK seems to have frequent train service (a train from Manchester to London every 20 minutes!), and there’s tons of public transportation (subway, buses, railcars) besides. Even Grenoble, a city of ~156,000 people, has multiple tram lines running frequently, tons of buses, and a busy train station. I wish we had stuff nearly that good in the US, outside of places like New York.

We stayed in four hotels over our trip, and I think all four of them were rather different. The Manchester hotel, Hotel Le Villé, looked like it was trying to be really hip and modern with glass and wood everywhere. The room itself was rather small, but functional. It was in the basement, which proved awesome for sleeping since the sun didn’t wake us up.


The hotel in London, La Meridiana, was more like an apartment building or house that had been converted into (still small) rooms, complete with tall and narrow staircases. They served a full British Breakfast (fried egg, sausage, bacon, beans, toast) every morning, and we got incredibly sick of them, especially because we’d had some in Manchester as well (back when it was a new thing).


The hotel in Grenoble, Hôtel d’Angleterre (amusingly “the Hotel of England”) was much larger than the previous two, and also fancier (it had a minifridge and bidet). Breakfast was not included, but we tried their buffet once (€14/person?) and it wasn’t bad… it was nice to have a break from the meat-and-carb breakfasts in the UK, anyway.


The Paris hotel, Grand Hôtel Lévêque, seemed fancier still, with its recently-remodelled (and therefore rather unusable) room. We were only there a night, but I’m glad I didn’t have to deal with its shower for longer than that… I was getting the entire bathroom wet when I showered, and the sink and toilet seemed more decorative than functional. It also had a hilariously small elevator that barely fit one person and a bag.

As I said, we also walked a lot. Here’s the pedometer-recorded steps and time walked and distances (which are estimates, and likely overestimates) by day:

Flights Monday 4/20 7117 steps 5.25 km/3.26 mi 0h 48m
Media City UK / Countdown Tuesday 4/21 11,403 steps 8.14 km/5.06 mi 1h 13m
Hiking in Peaks Wednesday 4/22 32,420 steps 23.98 km/14.90 mi 3h 57m
Manchester Thursday 4/23 17,420 steps 12.88 km/8.00 mi 1h 41m
Train to London / British Museum Friday 4/24 15,179 steps 11.17 km/6.94 mi 1h 28m
Museums Saturday 4/25 30,312 steps 22.42 km/13.93 mi 3h 06m
Oxford Sunday 4/26 29,935 steps 22.13 km/13.75 mi 3h 11m
London Monday 4/27 30,063 steps 22.20 km/13.79 mi 3h 38m
Trains to Grenoble Tuesday 4/28 9648 steps 7.10 km/4.41 mi 1h 09m
Hiking in Grenoble Wednesday 4/29 32,396 steps 23.9 km/14.85 mi 3h 53m
Train to Paris / Paris Thursday 4/30 20,239 steps 14.95 km/9.29 mi 2h 22m
Flights Friday 5/1 9976 steps 7.33 km/4.55 mi 1h 00m

Food was rather interesting during the trip. We did our obligatory afternoon tea (twice), although we couldn’t really stomach the £15-20/person charge for full tea, so we just did tea and scones or tea and cake. We did our obligatory crepes (savory and sweet). But otherwise we ate a variety of things, from Italian (very nicely done in Manchester) to Indian (buffet, in London) to Vietnamese (at a very cheap and friendly shop in London) to Thai (at Bien Bien in Paris, a place I’d been before with a Thai tour group). Also had a ton of sandwiches… they were convenient for hiking days and train days, and also every grocery or drug store in the UK seems to have a sandwich meal deal for around £4. Also tons of full English Breakfasts, which I never again feel the desire to eat.
Hotels seem to serve food early though… we had to set an alarm every day of the trip so we would wake up in time to not miss breakfast. The breakfast that went the latest (at our Paris hotel) we actually missed because we had to leave for the CDG airport before it started (at 7 AM). But we made up for that instead with an amazingly nice breakfast (at the cost of €40 :X) in the airport instead.

London apparently is doing a thing right now with Shaun the Sheep, and there are 50 statues up all over the city by various artists. We only found 8 during our wander-the-city-by-foot day.








My favorite of those is the second one we found: the royal one. It’s located, appropriately, close to Buckingham Palace.

As far as souvenirs, we brought back 2 art prints from the National Gallery and Musee d’Orsay, a ton of tea (both from Twinings and Casino, a French grocery store), and madeleines. Kind of amusing.

I’ll probably edit this later with more things as I remember to add them, but it was a very nice trip. Tons more photos of everything can be found at photos.

When it rains, it pours

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It has not been the greatest few weeks. In fact, it’s been a downright terrible two weeks, in many ways, with the exception of the rather awesome wedding.

The bedbug bites haven’t gone away yet, and in fact actually look a little angrier. But at least I haven’t gained any new ones since getting home.

It seems unlikely at this point that they will be faded by the time I have to get married. Fortunately there aren’t many on my hands, and I’ll be wearing long sleeves, but still. Argh blargh.
Time to look into makeup, maybe? Anyone know what kinds of concealer work well on arms for bug bites?

But on the other hand, Greg woke up on Friday with a couple of bites, and even more on Saturday. (His upper arm now looks a lot like mine.) Cue the freaking out that we missed something in our large sterilization campaign upon coming home. (It was a rather unhappy Saturday.) We spent most of the weekend cleaning the apartment for the inspector and trying in vain to find evidence of bedbugs.
Further research, however, shows that bedbug bites can take up to 14 days (!) to show up. So it’s entirely possible that we don’t actually have bedbugs, and all the bites are actually from the hotel in Florida. (This is supported by the fact that I have gotten no new bites since coming home, and he’d shown only two bites when we left Florida.)
We have an exterminator coming tomorrow to do an inspection to hopefully confirm the lack of bedbugs (or find evidence and put a plan in place). So that’s fun. But expensive. So yay for that.

Particularly so because OMG WEDDING THINGS is happening. There seems to be a pretty infinite list of last-minute things to do and the fact that I’m getting married in less than two weeks is finally sinking in. Super stressed out in general about that and trying to get everything done.
Fortunately, all the big things are done, so regardless of how much we drop the ball in the upcoming weeks, there’s still going to be a wedding. So that’s comforting at least.
(I kind of want to do a breakdown of all wedding costs once they’re finalized, but it looks like we’re going to be between $22k and $23k overall. Which is way over our initial estimate, but rather in line with our revised expectations. It’s been really weird spending money like this, and it isn’t something I want to get in the habit of doing, but hell if it hasn’t been really freeing to just be able to throw cash around on wedding-related things.)

I read an article today about how criminals were signing up accounts on the IRS website for people, downloading previous years’ tax returns, filing fake 2014 tax returns, and pocketing the improper refunds. So I went to sign up on the website… only to be told that the account already exists. So it seems very likely that I have been identity thieved, and I’ll have to contact the IRS tomorrow.
I would just freeze my credit, but then that would interfere with mortgage applications in the event that we actually do find a house to buy. Argh.
(If you want to sign up an account for yourself for protection, go to http://www.irs.gov/, click the “Get Transcript of Your Tax Records” link under “Tools”, and click the “Get Transcript ONLINE” button.)

Hopefully tomorrow brings good bedbug news and IRS resolutions. But I’m not counting on it. :\