Our Anniversary Weekend 8.23.09

We had a great Anniversary trip last weekend. Elise and I headed out to Omaha, NE for a 5-day trip, half business half relaxation. We spent Friday and Saturday with Elise's Aunt Mary Ann and Uncle Art and kids. It was a lot of fun hanging out with the boys. Art was so amazing as he gave us tons of maps and materials on Omaha and surrounding suburbs so we could get to know it demographically. He also took us around on a tourist drive around the cities. Absolutely a saint for doing that for us. Omaha area is definitely high on our list of places to move when I'm finished with school and ready to open our office. We will still be looking closer at Missouri and also the East Coast in the coming year, but let's just say Elise already has her heart set on Omaha.. :)

Once we got through our couple of days of work, we spent Sunday and Monday relaxing and enjoying our Anniversary and time together. We did a lot of wine tasting on Sunday, where we skipped over to the Iowa side of the cities (as those vineyards had FREE tastings and the ones we called in Omaha charged) and visited three different wineries/vineyards. This was our first time and we're so glad we went! We got to ask tons of questions and tasted probably close to 25 or 30 different wines. We got a bottle from each place to enjoy through this fall. We also walked around a couple of the vineyards and tasted some of the grapes (edelweiss was our favorite!). Sunday night we stayed at a historical mansion in Bellevue, NE. It was alright, nothing like the Laurium Manor Inn though! It was the same time period, but not at all as nice or historically accurate. It was fun to stay at a B&B again as we did a year ago. It was really neat, as I'll put a couple pics below, there was an old castle across the street from the mansion we stayed at. The castle wasn't open for tours on Monday when we walked the perimeter, but it was HUGE. We peeked in a few of the windows, but couldn't see much. It is called the Joslyn Castle, now used for weddings and other social events. Historically, Omaha's wealthiest family built it and lived there from the last 1800s until they passed away in the mid-1950's and the city took ownership. Must say, it was the first castle either of us had ever seen!

Can't remember the name of these grapes, but they were really good, too

Thought this was a sweet pic of the first vineyard we visited. You can see the dirt roads we had to ride for 20 minutes to reach it!

Can you see my wife?? These were rows and rows of grapes.

Elise was trying to be artistic...we'll give her a little credit. This is how dusty our car was from the dirt roads adventure.

Having fun at our third stop! Fresh Sangria was on the house here!

We were pretty impressed by how well this 70 year old woman took our picture on her first try. :)

We went to a sweet restaurant for our Anniversary dinner, which also turned out to be a winery, too. Guess the odds are high in that area.. Anyway, our waiter was this really cool old dude who was chatting with us all night, telling us stories of his days as a kid in Brooklyn and all this hilarious stuff. After dinner, while we were finishing our drinks, he brought us these Champagne grapes that one of the chefs had brought in for the staff to sample. Such a nice guy, and he didn't even know how special that made the end of our night!

Yeah, I might have ruined the moment.

This is the Joslyn Castle. Quite ridiculous...

So today was the MN State Fair. Elise and I had pre-purchased admission tickets AND tickets to our first concert (yes, we are sheltered yoopers...........). We were planning to go see Kelly Clarkson and Eric Hutchinson as the tickets were fairly cheap, $35 each. Our roomate, Kelly, and her boyfriend were also planning to come with us. So, we left today around 3:30pm for the fair. Paid to take the city bus to St. Paul's fairgrounds. Walked around for a couple hours to kill time, but there wasn't much to do at the fair unless you had money. So we headed over to the Grand Stand to have Kelly pick up their tickets from the booth, only to see flashing up on the gigantic sign, "Kelly Clarkson cancelled tonight's concert due to illness." DANG we all said, and there were about 200 people around us saying the same thing. So we got our ticket refunds all sorted out, but were still really ticked off that we wasted all that time and money for nothing. We hopped back on a bus and headed home after that... I guess it was a good thing though as we now have 5 free hours to do whatever we want. We are tackling the mountain of laundry that has been piling up for the past month...5 loads are going right now! Feels good to get the apartment cleaned up now that we're actually home with some free time for a change.

Break has been going great for me. I study for Part 2 Boards a few hours every day and get to relax a little here and there. Much needed after last semester's stress. Getting excited for this next semester, only one more year left!

And Elise keeps remind me to post this, as we forgot to include August Birthdays.... Happy birthday to our sister Mary on Aug 8th. (don't worry, we did wish her happy birthday before now! ;)

Hope everyone enjoys these last few weeks of Summer! Fall is almost here, and the weather sure is showing it!!

- Dave