Early Spring in Elmhurst

Wishing to avoid the congested Chinese New Years traffic, I flew to the Elmhurst on February 3 for six weeks. While last year I spent 3 months in Shanghai and then 3 months in Elmhurst, this year's schedule has been different. With the girls in Asia for Christmas, I didn't leave until just before Chinese New Year and planned to stay until a wedding in March, before returning for my last 6 weeks living in China. It was a great visit, but flew by.
 
I flew to NYC to visit Elizabeth for the Valentine's/Presidents' Day weekend. We had a great weekend, including a Saturday matinee of Kinky Boots. I loved the show - it was so much fun and was the kind of musical that leaves you smiling when you walk out of the theatre.  Lauren and Elizabeth's UPenn friend Dawen went with us, both to the pre-show brunch at the Russian Tea Room and to Kinky Boots. Of course, we had a lot of good food, as we always do with Elizabeth, and we had a fun Sunday brunch in honor of Elizabeth's UPenn roommate, Cathy's birthday, followed by trivia night at a local bar. Even though it was a cold weekend in New York, it was a lot of fun.

In honor of Chinese New Year, I made some pork dumplings with the recipe Peter's former Ayi, Annie, gave us last year. They were delicious and a big hit, but we could be eating them for a long time - I gave away two containers of them and still have two in the freezer.

The weekend after I was in New York, Elizabeth came to Elmhurst to host a bachelorette party for her good friend Kelly at our house. During the festivities, I had a lovely day shopping, having lunch, and going to the movies with the two moms - mother-of-the-bride, Melonie, and mother-of-the-groom, Jane. We had a great day and saw a wonderful movie - McFarland, USA, which was a fabulous sports movie.

I spent some time in Elmhurst getting a few things put back in place in our house and getting ready to move home. We had staged our house for sale for two years, so we moved a lot of furniture out to the garage and took down all the pictures from the walls, etc. Our stager even chose the color paint for our living room. So, now that we're moving back, I'm looking forward to moving back into our house, repainting the living room, and making it ours again. I knew there had to be a reason the contracts we had on the house sale didn't go through.

On March 3, I flew to Atlanta to spend Samantha's spring break with her. First, we went to see Wicked, one of my favorite Broadway musicals ever. We ate good BBQ and, once Samantha finished class on Friday, we headed to Alabama for our spring break road trip. Samantha suggested the trip to help check off Alabama on my list of states, as I was down to only 6 left; now it's 5. Our friend Len had asked his Alabama friends for suggestions, so we took their list and planned our itinerary, starting in Huntsville, with a visit to the US Space and Rocket Center.


Little did we know that, on Friday, March 6, Huntsville would be closed due to "inclement weather." There had apparently been ice two days before, so the Space center was closed, as was the Safari zoo and gardens we'd plan to visit. However, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and there was just a few patches of ice on the ground. We did get to a Military museum and then to the Space center on Saturday morning. It's a similar museum to the Space museum at the Smithsonian, just on a smaller scale. This is also the home to Space Camp, which my girls considered at different times. All-in-all, very cool, even though the ice was sparse.

I was out of touch enough that I didn't realize we were heading to Montgomery on the 50th anniversary weekend of the Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery. So, not only did we hit huge traffic from Huntsville to Montgomery, but we got the last hotel room in the area, although we were in Prattville, outside of Montgomery.

On Sunday, March 8, we headed to the Montgomery Zoo. It seems that everyone else was at President Obama's speech in Montgomery, so we had the zoo to ourselves. Given that it was a cool morning, but not cold, we had the chance to see many of the animals be very active, especially the big cats. We saw a yellow and black spotted mother jaguar with two black cubs and she was very wary of us, pacing back and forth in front of us while her cubs climbed around in the back. We liked the different environments that contained many different types of animals, such as giraffes, hippos, ostriches, deer, and more. Samantha was brave enough to go into two different aviaries, one of which was filled with hundreds of canaries. 
 

While we enjoyed walking around the zoo, we really loved taking the skylift chair ride over the zoo. I've never seen something like this, basically just a chair lift that took us over the zoo for a bird's eye view, but I think every zoo should have one. What a great view of the animals.

After the zoo, we had tickets to the matinee performance of "The Importance of Being Earnest" at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, an incredible theater set in the middle of a beautiful park in Montgomery. It was such a gorgeous day, we took a picnic to one of the picnic tables in the park, walked around the park, and enjoyed the sunshine. 

While we would have loved to see a Shakespeare play while at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, we couldn't have been happier seeing "The Importance of Being Earnest," always a favorite and very well done. I truly love seeing live theater and it was great to see such a funny show in that beautiful location.

After the show, we jumped back on the road and headed down to Mobile for the next stop on our road trip. 

Our first stop on Monday, March 9, was the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park. There are three self-guided tours through the Battleship which involve a lot of ladder-climbing, but gives you a fascinating view into what life on the battleship was like, especially during WWII. Samantha was a great tour guide, leading us through the many different deck levels.  

While I'm quite a WWII history buff, Samantha may have had more than her share of it on this trip, after the Military museum in Huntsville and the USS Alabama in Mobile. But, after leaving the Alabama, we headed to downtown Mobile to a great lunch and a fun little bookstore, both big favorites for Samantha. The lunch was at a Pita Pit, a chain I haven't seen in the north, which is like Subway but uses pitas instead of sub rolls. I really liked it, as I always think there's too much bread to Subway's sandwiches. We strolled down the street to a small independent bookstore and spent quite a while searching the shelves. Unfortunately, we didn't see a lot going on in downtown Mobile, which doesn't look like it has completely recovered from Hurricane Katrina yet.

Monday afternoon, we headed to Gulf Shores and played in the white sand beaches of the Gulf. While the area said it was geared up for spring break, we had trouble seeing it as much of a spring break destination for college students, as there didn't seem to be a lot going on in the area. We drove on to Pensacola, FL for the night and then drove back to Atlanta on Tuesday, before flying back to Chicago on Wednesday. Samantha spent some of our drive to Atlanta talking to a professor at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, as they had accepted her for their master's degree program. They came up with a great package for her, including a research assistant position and good stipend, so Samantha decided on Wednesday to accept and will be starting the MILR program in August. We're very excited and proud.

We returned to Elmhurst on Wednesday afternoon and Chris was already there. Elizabeth arrived Wednesday night and Miranda arrived on Friday evening. This is the first time the five of us have all been home in Elmhurst together in a long time - I really loved having the whole family together. Elizabeth was a bridesmaid in Kelly and Joe's wedding on Super Pi Day, 3.14.15, so we were all excited for the wedding.  Not only have Elizabeth and Kelly been good friends since they met in high school tennis, Joe and Elizabeth dated for three years, which is when I met his mother Jane, who has subsequently become my best friend. Our families are very close, so this felt almost like a family wedding to us.

After the wonderful wedding weekend, Samantha returned to Emory, Miranda returned to Cornell, Elizabeth flew to Atlanta, where her current project is, and then Chris and I flew back to Shanghai. I'll only be back for 6 weeks before I return to Elmhurst for good. Samantha graduates from Emory over Mother's Day weekend, so I wanted to be back in time to get over any jet lag before driving from Elmhurst to Atlanta for graduation. I have a lot I want to see and do in Shanghai before we leave, including a long weekend in Tokyo, but I will be happy to move back to Elmhurst and restart our lives there. It's a great journey we're on here, but it's time for the next chapter.