Ohio in October

You may have seen the post about Ohio last October - the one with the scary lodging we quickly ran from... Well, here's the rest of that trip.

Our lovely friends Jess & Jen live in Ohio and we're sad that we don't get to see them more often. This 10 days or so gave us the opportunity to visit with them several times. Our wonderful times together included several tasty meals, lots of stories and laughter, a wide variety of fandoms with a healthy proportion of Doctor Who, and a day trip to the Renn Faire. We had some tasty food, saw lots of fantastic costumes and crafts, avoided the loud noises as much as possible, and generally had a fantastic time together.

Jess & I started off the Faire with a selfie while our wives bought us drinks. This is the first photo of the two of us together - in five years of friendship.

Gandalf agreed to a photo on his way back to his carriage

group selfies - not easy

yay! all of us together

sometimes art is weird

Lovely stained glass art

I nearly bought this journal

So, Heather and I wandered into one of the little shops and walked along opposite sides of a shoulder-height shelf lined with journals (see below). A few minutes later, we turned to each other from opposite sides of the store and said (in almost perfect unison) "Sweetie, look at this one!" The store owner laughed as he saw that we were holding up the same journal, only mine was in silver and hers was bronze toned.  Take a look below and see if you can guess which one caught both our eyes.

If you guessed the one with the t'ai chi sign and bamboo, you've met us once or twice. ;P

This is all hand sculpted metal, hand painted, too. So beautiful - the photo really doesn't do it justice...

Constellations around the TARDIS

Yeah, there were a lot of wonderful crafts there, but finding other fandom geeks in the midst of the Renn Faire geeks was just a bonus.

WOW... it has been a while. Oops.

Anyway, in November we took a trip to North Carolina to see a friend. It was a lot of fun. We saw some interesting stuff but with Cindy getting sick it wasn't as awesome as it could have been. However, I did get to see a DaVinci codex, so that was epic.

After that we headed to Atlanta to see more friends. Sadly, Cindy was too sick and we headed home. Everyone was sad.

Once home we rested and healed enough so that our trip to New Orleans was a go. That was a hell of a lot of fun. We went with some friends, saw a lot of stuff, had some great food and listened to some great Jazz. Such a lovely trip. Also, David and I checked out the National WWII museum. It was awesome. And then I found out that the displays were based on books by a friend of my father, which explained why they seemed familiar. Heh...

This trip we went up to VA to stay a night with Tiffany. Opal, one of her cats totally remembered us and spent our whole over night stay with and on us. It was very cute. Next was PA for a night. It was a nice place and we enjoyed it. Again the local feline spent the time with us, sleeping on the bed.

Currently we are on Staten Island. The house we are in was built in 1899 so it is epic, with twisty stairs and a clawfoot tub and the like. So very cool. And our hosts are really neat. Dulu and Nilefer are very sweet people and very generous. That and they are really cute together. They had fun trying to explain Cricket to Cindy and I. I at least had a basic clue as to the rules. Cindy started with no clue. It was fun.

New York has been a blast. We have seen Na'ama and her daughter several times, eaten some great food, walked through Central Park, went to a Goodwill for scarves (because it has been colder than expected), chatted with some Marine Corp vets who run a hat stand near Times Square. All in all a lot of fun. Today we are garden bound and might go see a show. I'll try to keep you all updated.