Ten Things I Probably Should Have Blogged... #8

Today’s post is part 8 of a 10-post list of events in our lives that we probably should have blogged about during the past two years.  I’ve enjoyed taking a step back and remembering those moments.  I hope you do too!

8.  “Summering at the Cape” - July, 2013

One of my closest friends, Whitney, has gone to visit family in Boston and stay in her family’s house on Cape Cod for as long as I’ve known her.  When we were in college, I got to spend 10 days with her there and absolutely loved it.  It’s one of my favorite trips I’ve ever been on, and I have shared my memories of that trip with Savva many times.

This summer at another friend’s wedding, Whitney and Savva were chatting and she invited Savva and me to come visit them before school started back.  Immediately, Savva and I knew we wanted to make this trip happen.

All the details worked out perfectly and we were on our way in July, 2013!  I can’t say enough about this trip and this family - they are incredible!

Waiting at the airport in Charlotte!  Our flight was delayed so we enjoyed people watching - especially the people running to their connecting flight from our plane when it finally landed!

We rented a car and drove to Barnstable, MA and to the small town of Cotuit.  If you’ve never been, imagine a small town out of a Nicholas Sparks book that just makes you take a step back in time and enjoy the little things in life.  I am in love with this little town and everything about it!

Aerial view of Cotuit Bay and the Cotuit Kettleers baseball field.  Photo courtesy of:  Kettleers.org

We didn’t arrive until after midnight the first night, and poor Whitney waited up for us!  She had to be exhausted but we were so excited to see each other!  We quickly fell asleep knowing we were in for an exciting stay with the Mihaich family.

Early the next morning, we woke up and ate breakfast.  If you know the Mihaich’s, you know they are an active family!  After breakfast, it was time for our morning run...or walk...or jog - whichever group you chose to go with.  There two other families staying with us that week who are great fun also, so we all set out to enjoy the morning!  The walking group was led by Momma Ellen (Whitney’s mother) while the running group was led by Poppa Steve (Whitney’s father).  Whitney, Savva, and I chose to take our own route so we could have some time to chat and catch up.  We called it a “walkrun” because we did a little of both.  It was a beautiful morning to get out and about and show Savva the little town that we were calling “home” for the next few days.

This town truly has all the makings of Nicholas Sparks novel.  It has the beach: quiet and peaceful, filled with the white sails and the glimmer of waves lapping against the shore.  It’s really quite incredible.  The houses are gorgeous.  Some are just massive.  Ours is a quaint, dark colored house that actually used to be part of a garage behind a house owned by Ellen’s family.  It is down somewhat of a hidden driveway marked only by a curved tree. Believe me, when you are arriving in the middle of the night and you are looking for that curved tree, it really is a hidden driveway!

This isn't the best picture of the house, but I can't find the other one I took!  This is miss Abigail "Abby" Mihaich :)  You can see how the house is beautifully hidden.  I love it!

Once you enter the house, you are immediately taken away to a world with light blue painted walls and a “home away from home” feel to it.  The kitchen is always filled with food to feed an army, and everyone puts in a helping hand when it’s time to cook.

Around the corner you will find a small card table with a puzzle.  The puzzle is put out on the table at the beginning of the trip, and the goal is to finish it by the end of the stay.  Each person staying at the house can be seen at some point during their stay sitting at the table, thoughtfully piecing together sections of the puzzle. This year’s puzzle was a picture of boats on a dock in front of beautifully unique houses all in a row.  There were tall green trees and seagulls perched on the docks.  Working on the puzzle allowed you to escape into a world where this reality is captured. If you're curious, we finished it the night before we left!

Throughout the next few days, you might catch us doing any of the following activities:

- swimming in the FREEZING water across to an island

- laying on the beach chatting (with anyone and everyone who was there)
-paddleboarding

 - sailing with Momma Ellen (she is an amazing sailor!!)

-gazing in awe at the houses on the coastline (as you can imagine, Stephanie's imagination was running wild dreaming of a lifestyle like that!)

The story behind this house is that a man wanted to buy out the entire peninsula.  He approached the owner of the house that once stood here and this conversation is rumored to have happened: "How much for your house?" "It's not for sale." "How's $10 million cash?" "When do we need to move out?"  Thus began the construction of this enormous compound!

- playing with the wildlife

- digging for clams

- cooking the clams we caught

- watching movies

- walking on the beach
- taking a family picture in a human pyramid on the beach (I really wish I had that picture on my camera!)

- walking through the neighborhoods

- reading
- watching a Cotuit Kettleers baseball game

- working on the family puzzle

- playing a very competitive game of Michigan Rummy

And then there was the scavenger hunt.  Momma Ellen does not disappoint when entertaining her guests!  Each day was met her cheerfully saying, "Family fun till the day is done!!" Thus, the birth of the scavenger hunt:

Ellen was the only one who knew all of the clues and it was kept very secret until "go" time. She also very strategically organized the teams. Let me tell you, it got competitive! We had to take pictures of every task we completed and points were awarded for each completed task.

As soon as Ellen said "GO" we were off! We ran to the vans and the race began! The competition came down to just a few points and my team lost on a technicality (Savva and Whitney's team won!). The difference in the game came from a photograph we took with the Cotuit Kettleer. There was a game that night and when we got to the field they were taking batting practice. Me, being me, walked right to the fence and asked the coach if we could borrow one of his players for a picture. A little flirting got us a great picture with a player...who turned out to be for the other team - OOPS!! Since we didn't get a picture with a Kettleer, we didn't get points. Lame! I thought we should have gotten extra points for welcoming the opposing team to Cotuit ;-)

We have the following pictures of the scavenger hunt because Savva's camera was used for their team. I don't have any pictures from my team (they're on another camera), but you can get a good idea of our adventures. Tasks included:

Take a picture of:

a group pyramid on home plate of a baseball field

a group member "high-fiving" a runner on the road

as many weather vanes as you could find

a Cotuit Kettleer (this picture proved to be the winner!)

a special type of rock (I can't remember the name of it, but it had a line down the middle)

 

one of your group members dunking on a basketball goal

as many personalized license plates as you could find

as many dogs as you could find

an item in the kitchen that starts with the letter "R"

as many road signs that have a "Q" in them

We also had to successfully put together a puzzle and choreograph a dance to a song chosen by Courtney (Whitney's twin sister who was not able to make the trip because she is living overseas right now). 

On the day we had to leave Cotuit, we left at 5:30am to spend the day in Boston.  This was our last view of Cotuit as the sun rose.

Savva had never been to Boston and I was so excited to show him the city!  It took 2 hours instead of 1 to get to Boston due to rush hour traffic on a Monday morning, but I enjoyed feeling like a “city girl” for the day!  

We parked in a parking deck that was underground Boston Common and started our adventure!

Savva got his first experience riding on a subway!

Some things we saw:

- an old Asian man practicing something I had only seen the monks do in “The Next Karate Kid” right beside a pond in Boston Common

- seriously about 1400 Dunkin’ Doughnuts (how do you know which one to meet a friend at?!?)

- Boston Harbor

- the site of the Boston Massacre

- Massachusetts State House and the Old State House

- Several places on the Freedom Trail

- Faneuil Hall (we ate some really good Greek food for lunch here!)

Some Highlights of Our Day:

1.  Harvard’s Campus - We were pretty dorky when it came to this part of the visit.  We wondered the entire time what it must be like to go to a school like this.  I loved the colorful chairs on Harvard Yard, and, since it was a Monday, we got to see actual students enjoying the afternoon on the Yard.  We then walked through the historical gate of Harvard’s campus and entered a more modern part of campus.  We both really needed to use the restroom, and Savva was so pleased when we walked right into the science building and acted like students just so we could use the bathroom! We both felt super smart :)

2.  Fenway Park

After walking around the outside of the ballpark like 4 times, we decided to pay for a tour so we could get inside.  Then, we realized it was game day, so we chose a “batting practice” tour so we could tour the park and then watch batting practice!  While we waited for our tour to start, we sat at a bar located under the centerfield stands.  We could actually see the field from the viewpoint of a centerfielder, and that was super neat and unexpected.

We took a tour inside the history and tradition of Fenway Park and got to walk on the field.  We took some pictures as the players were starting to warm up, and then we made our way up to the Green Monster to sit.

And there we were, just as excited and giddy as the kids we were sitting with.  Adults and children alike, we tried to catch every ball that came our way!  It was so much fun and definitely Savva’s favorite part of the day.  The little boy sitting next to us and another in front of us both caught home runs!

3.  The finish line of the Boston Marathon - This experience ranks up there close to visiting the 9/11 Memorial (back in 2011) in terms of the speechless, sobering, quiet that you feel when you know you are standing somewhere where something so unbelievable happened.  Both experiences - in NYC and in Boston - meant even more to us because we remember where we were when we heard about these tragedies.  We remember watching the television for hours as we just could not peel ourselves away from the new clips repeating over and over.

We knew we wanted to see where the Boston bombings took place.  It had only been three months since it happened, so we weren’t sure what it would look like.  Savva and I decided not to take pictures of the things we saw there because it would be disrespectful for passersby who may have been much more closely affected than we were that day.

While we were on the subway coming back from Fenway, we looked up the locations of the bombings and got the street names.  We followed our map to the streets and then put away the maps to just walk.  We felt came around a corner and saw a church whose railings were covered in ribbons with memorials for the victims.  It literally took my breath away.  For the entire length of the church we saw nothing but ribbons.  Because this was not the actual bombing site, we did take a picture of this.  In the midst of a busy Monday in the middle of Boston, this stretch of Boston sidewalk was silent.

We continued walking just to see where the path would lead us and we eventually sat down at an outdoor table outside Firehouse Subs.  As we chatted and wondered what it would’ve been like to be in the midst of the chaos that day, we decided to look on my phone to see exactly where the bombing occurred.  With the exception of the church railing, we had not seen any memorials.

That’s when I saw it.

On my phone I saw a picture of a bloody body and people rushing to help.  And in the bottom corner of the photograph, I saw a sign that said “Firehouse Subs.”  We were sitting right where it all happened.  We sat in disbelief, in silence, and in awe that some place so beautiful and “normal” had, only three months before, been the site of such horror.

The blood and chaos was gone, but our perceptions immediately changed as did the atmosphere of our surroundings.  Without saying a word, we stood up and began walking.  What we saw next I will never forget.  

Savva noticed it first - there was a new post office box sitting on the corner in place of where the bomb had exploded.  We kept walking as not to draw attention to ourselves as “gawking”.  The mailbox was on our left, and when I looked to my right, we saw the restaurant.  Closed and covered for restoration, The Forum still left some of it’s gaping wounds open to the public.  Around the sign for the restaurant, we could still see the shrapnel sticking into the building.  We could see a glimpse of the reality of that day.  The BB holes that ripped through the metal siding.  The gashes in the sign.  The large piece of shrapnel that was stuck into the building, stabbing at passersby who are just trying to move on.  The largest piece still had a chalk circle around it with an evidence number written on it.

We crossed the street and walked past the other bombing site that was signified by a simple bow around a light pole.  It was equally as sobering.  Hauntingly quiet were these locations in the middle of a bustling city.

Here is a photo of the finish line - the only photo other than the ribbons that we shot that day:

 

We could not have asked for a better trip to spend together and with some great family friends! We can't wait to go back one day, and we have also been planning our next trip to a new place. Any suggestions on what our next adventure should be?

Ten Things I Probably Should Have Blogged... #7

Today’s post is part 7 of a 10-post list of events in our lives that we probably should have blogged about during the past two years.  I’ve enjoyed taking a step back and remembering those moments.  I hope you do too!

7.  Getting Active - Summer 2013

Savva and I love to be outside and try to be active as much as we can.  Unfortunately, this has been a big struggle for me especially as I try to learn the balance of teaching, spending time with Savva, and making time for me.  It’s hard.  I’m tired all the time and frankly, when I have a day off, I sometimes just want to do nothing.

This summer we did try to make more of an effort to be active again and I hope this continues and becomes a big part of our lives like it used to be.  Growing up is hard!  It’s so easy to let your job consume you, and that’s a hard lesson I have had to work every day at overcoming.  I’m still working on that.

So back to this summer - Savva and I entered in competitions of a new kind.  It was new.  And scary.  And we loved it.

Savva entered in his first wakeboarding competition.  I have watching him wrestle all four years of college, but NEVER was I as nervous as I was during that wakeboarding competition.  It was so different, but I am so proud of him for taking that step to become a competitive wakeboarder.

The competition was in Burlington and he entered in the Masters division.  Most of the other competitors knew each other - I’m sure it’s very similar to travel softball or club wrestling where you meet up and compete against the same people often.  By the end of the day, many of them were pretty welcoming to Savva so I was happy to see that.

We weren’t sure what to expect when we got there, but we were there bright and early for registration.  Lesson #1 we learned: we didn’t have to get there until later in the morning.  Or really like noon.  But we were there at 7:30.  We went ahead and registered and then went to breakfast with my parents (who were awesome and so supportive all day!).  When we came back, we sat on the shore of the lake and cheered on the junior divisions.

When it was time for Savva to go, Demetre set up the video camera and we all held our breath just hoping he would complete his run.  If you fall twice, you are done, so that’s what we didn’t want to happen.  He did his first trick and landed it, then went HUGE for a next big trick and busted HARD.  The announcer said that was by far the hardest fall of the day.  He was ok and so he got back up.  All of a sudden, the tension lifted and he was out there having fun and doing his thing!  He looked awesome out there!  Or “totally rad” as my favorite pro rider would say ;-)

I compared it to that first inning of softball or that first pitch during an at-bat when you get whatever nerves you might have out of your system.  After he fell, he looked like a completely different rider and completed his two passes perfectly.  Lesson #2 we learned:  in competitions, you have to do your tricks a little faster so you get them all in in the allotted time.  He was a little slower, but we both agreed that he landing his tricks was the most important thing this time around.  We can work on his speed later.

We really weren’t sure what to expect when it came time for trophies.  I, for sure, don’t know how they score it and we weren’t quite sure if he would podium.  We were so excited when they announced that Savva had won 2nd place!!!  I was so happy for him and so proud of his accomplishments.  He is hoping to enter more competitions throughout next summer and start moving up in the wakeboarding world.  It’s pretty difficult to do that in the location we live in because we have good lake weather only a few months out of the year.  My favorite pro rider, Harley Clifford, rides year-round by living in Florida for 6 months and Australia (his home country) for 6 months.   Wouldn’t that be nice?!?

Now, my accomplishment doesn’t come close to that.  My accomplishment is just the fact that I did it.  I competed.  Without any training (or any real running since my ball playing days), I called one of my closest friends and asked her to enter in a 5k with me.  When?  That weekend.  Ha!  

We ran once the week leading up to the race just to prove that we could still do it.  Times sure have changed since she and I played at ASU.  We decided that on the day of the race, we would start off by walking to get our legs warm and then we would start running and take it at our pace.  Our goal would be simply to finish - who cares about podiums and times anyway?

Well, we didn’t...until the gun went off and our competitive instincts took over.  We started running right out of the gate!  No warming up, no stretching, and, keep in mind, no training.  What were we thinking?!?  But we did it together!  When you are teammates, you are teammates for life.  We pushed each other and never stopped.  I would’ve never done it by myself, but with Kayla, I was able to do it.

We have no idea what our time was, but we crossed the finish line together and tied for 3rd place.  We were just happy we made it to the finish line and didn’t fall out in the middle of the woods!  Can’t wait to do it again, but maybe this time we will actually train and do it the right way ;-)

Like I said, Savva is hoping to compete more next season in wakeboarding.  As for me, I’d like to potentially run a triathlon, but I’ll be happy with just getting myself in better shape.  We’ll see!