Tales Of Our Random Life: Philly Visit

Okay okay, I know I am in serious need of a blog update... my apologies.

We returned from yet another trip to the States a couple of weeks ago. Aaron and I flew into Denver, where we met and dropped the kids off with Saint Grandma and took off for Albuquerque for one of the country's biggest Hot Sauce Festivals. We stayed two nights there, returned to Denver and parted ways for a couple days. He went on to New Jersey and I went to Wyoming to pick up the kids, only to return to Denver the next day and fly the three of us to New Jersey. NJ is the home to our good friends Ted and Rachael, Ted was having a surprise birthday party so we flew in for the occasion. Aaron and Ted golfed for 3 or 4 days and by some miracle had great weather!

I think this was my quickest visit home to date. I arrived around noon and went to lunch with the kids, my mom, dad, grandma and my sister was able to meet us for a few minutes. Later that night everyone came over for pizza and the next day I packed the kids into the car and hit the road.

We arrived at Newark Airport (aka the pits of hell) in the early afternoon and by an amazing act of god finally made it to the rental car area... if you haven't had the pleasure of flying into Newark, don't do it. Just don't. They didn't have any signs when you got off the plane to tell you where to go, we found an elevator but it too, was sans signs to tell you what floor you need to be on, and after getting off the elevator Jax told me he never wanted to go on that elevator again. It stunk like pee. We finally made it to baggage, which amazingly did have signs, which I read and told me to go to the opposite side of the baggage area to get over-sized bags, car seats and the like... so I hauled the stroller and our luggage cart on down, only to be told that those things will come out on the turnstile. Really. Thanks.

Got all of our stuff and realized that we needed to get on their train to go to the rental car area. I read the sign and it said I needed to be on platform 2 for Budget. Okay great, get the stroller and luggage cart onto the elevator and squeezed into a train car and a helpful man informed me that platform 2 was closed now and I needed to be at platform 3. Okay thanks. Well whaddayaknow... when I got off on platform 3 the man there said no, you need platform 2, it's not closed he must have meant platform 1... awesome!!!! Turn around kids, stroller, luggage cart and back into the train we went. We made it, had no issues after that point and it was smooth sailing the hour drive to Ted and Rachael's...

We arrived on Wednesday and just hung out. Thursday the big boys went golfing and I took the kids with me to meet up with a friend that lived in Philly. Friday we all squeezed in the car and took the kids to Philadelphia's "Please Touch Children's Museum." It was a lot of fun, we all enjoyed a puppet show and afterward went to lunch at a great Mexican restaurant.

Saturday was the day of the surprise party. It started raining on Friday and by Saturday things were flooding. They have had so much snow that the ground was already completely saturated and there was no room for the water to go. At some point the power went out, as did the sump pump in the basement, and Ted spent much of the day filling up buckets to dump outside while Rach went and drove to 3 or 4 Home Depots finding a generator. We worried that the power wouldn't come back on and there was no way we were going to get Ted out of the house to go out when his basement could flood. At 5:00 we decided to break the surprise and tell him that there was a party and 70 or so of his closest friends would be waiting for him... about 15 minutes later the power came back on! After some babysitter snafu's we dropped the kids off at a friend of theirs and off to the city we went. In the end it all worked out and the night was great but getting thru that day was stressful on everyone:)

Here are a few pics, will post more in part 2.

Uncle Ted and Riley on the bike