Posts Tagged ‘food’

After seeing Edinburgh for a little bit, we decided to see my old college friend who now lives in Oban.  This is a small port town north of Glasgow on the west coast of Scotland, and not far from all the famed Scottish isles.  It’s a beautiful place!

Oban's Coastline

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So sorry to be so far behind in our adventures. We’ve had a wonderful time seeing friends and family and haven’t had much time for blogging. But, that does mean that we have lots of wonderful days to post about!

We arrived in Edinburgh after one of the nicest (read: least bumpy) flights ever. There was one slight mishap on the getting to the airport in Madrid. I woke up, in a panic that I had slept through my alarm, roused Justin and very sleepily hustled us out of the hostel, only to find out that my alarm hadn’t even gone off yet! We were about two hours earlier to the airport than we needed to be. But I suppose that’s better than two hours late.

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After a getting briefly lost on our way out of Barcelona (thanks everyone else for fixing that one!) we had a long but uneventful drive to Madrid and got rid of the car on our way into town.  Madrid has a really great metro system (the best one we’ve seen so far) and so it was much easier to get around that way than with the car in the city.

We were hungry after our long drive, so after getting our friends checked into their hotel we set out in search of something to eat.  We found a type of restaurant I hadn’t seen before.  It was a place where they had a bunch of sandwiches, pastas and salads all ready to buy and take home, but you could have them put it on a nice plate and eat it there if you wanted.  Genius!  After dinner, Justin and I headed over to the same hostel that we had stayed in on our first trip to Madrid and got settled in.

The next day was a sight-seeing marathon!  We saw parks, museums, buildings, the big bullfighting arena, and somehow still had enough energy to go out in the evening!

Really cool statue

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We arrived in Barcelona and went right to the hotel to meet up with our good friends from home.  This was so exciting!  We got 4 whole days traveling with them and it was glorious!  The hotel we stayed at in Barcelona was quite a bit more pricey than we’ve been used to, but we were excited to have our own bathroom and a really comfy bed for a couple of nights.

We went out and tasted some of the food and nightlife in the neighborhood we were staying in.

Amazing seafood paella!

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Hazel decided that for my birthday she would get me a nice night out in Spain – complete with Flamenco Dancing!  This has been something I’ve been really into since I saw a show in Ithaca back in 2005.  So I was stoked!  It turned out to be the perfect evening.  We started out the night at the restaurant “El Buey” – a favorite Hazel found on SpottedByLocals.com, a site that’s half TripAdvisor and half blog with entries by locals from the area.  We love this site!  Anyway, back to our date.  The specialty of the house is cook-it-yourself OX!  They bring 1kg of ox tenderloin sliced thinly (along with patatas fritas of course) and ceramic plates heated to a really high temperature.  Meat goes on plate, and voila!

El Buey

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So even though we had just arrived in Madrid the day before we decided to take a little bus ride out of the city (about an hour) and head to Toledo.  We spent most of the morning running around to every bus station in Madrid, buying our onward tickets to Barcelona and then trying to find the right bus, but we eventually found it and had an uneventful ride out to Toledo.

And we were glad we went because the town was really beautiful!  We had a nice fixed menu lunch and walked around the town all afternoon.  We explored the Jesuit church and went up the bell tower to get some great views out over the town.  The town is made up of lots of narrow, winding streets with cool stone buildings lining them and was so scenic for a long walk.  The cathedral was pretty pricey to go into, so we ended up just walking around the outside, but we got some good pictures of the stonework.

Entrance to the town

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Dr. DeWitt the veterinarian!

We had a very fun and joyful stop in Ithaca, NY to watch Justin’s sister Jessica graduate from veterinary school at Cornell University.  It’s good to have a doctor in the family!

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We made it to Niagara Falls, Canada and checked in to a cute little cabin.  It had two bedrooms, a living room, bathroom, and really nice lawn with picnic table out back.  We were worried about the weather since there were thunderstorms in the area, but in the end we were so lucky because it was sunny during the day and the big storms came at night.  Our hotel was close enough to the falls that we could walk down, and we had fun taking lots of photos on the way.  Click on any of these to see the photo gallery!

Canadian Phone Booth

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While we were in the Philadelphia area we had to have a Philly Cheesesteak.  There are two famous spots to eat them, Pat’s and Geno’s, and they are right across the intersection from each other.  We chose Geno’s because the line was shorter, it looks fancier, he’s had some crazy political controversy, and we had never had either, so we had to start somewhere!

Lining up in the street!

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We’re having such a wonderful time here in New Jersey!  It’s pretty amazing to be living in a house for a little while again, speaking a language we know well, and getting to spend a lot of time with family.  We’ve even managed to have some adventures, a haircut, and a bit of new clothing!

A few days ago we went down to Cape May, a nice town in the far south of New Jersey.  It is one of the best birdwatching places in the US and since my dad was with us we got to see a lot of different birds – 80 species in the same day!  We had a guest photographer, my mom, since she is looking at cameras for when she meets up with us in Africa, so all of the photos in this post were taken by her.

Hundreds of birds at Cape May

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