The best part of the Thanksgiving holiday? Spending time with family and eating lots of good food. The downside? Having to return to work Monday morning. The Christmas break (aka, the week of vacation I'm taking between Christmas and New Years) can't come soon enough.
After a filling Thanksgiving dinner and dessert on Thursday, I woke up early Friday morning to meet a few of my friends from high school for breakfast at First Watch. As this was the first holiday in a while where D and I have made it back to my hometown, it was fun catching up with friends whom I hadn't seen in awhile. It's nice to know that we can still easily pick up conversations where we left them, regardless of the time apart.
On Friday afternoon, I took Leroy up to Harbin Park for a nice long walk. He's always a fan of running around in the grass (a rare occurrence in the city) and this was no exception. In general, Leroy was an okay visitor at my parent's house. He was quite standoffish with my parents and Chris and Ashley. My Mom and Dad were able to give him a few pets on our last day there, though Leroy wasn't entirely sure letting them pet him was a good idea. On Saturday, D and I took Leroy to Wiggly Field Dog Park at the Voice of America MetroPark in West Chester. This park was awesome and Leroy had a ball running around with a few greyhounds and chasing after a football. The only downside was that the park was quite muddy due to recent rainstorms. Luckily, Leroy didn't make too much of a mess of himself.
On Saturday night, my parents took D and I out to dinner at Vincenzo's Ristorante Italiano in Sharonville. The restaurant was new to me and I had a great meal of cheese ravioli with a tomato cream sauce and mushrooms. D and I shared a heavenly tiramisu dessert, which I knocked back with a shot of espresso, per usual.
D and I headed back on the road on Sunday morning after a filling breakfast of eggs and hashbrowns made by my father. Though the rainy weather was no fun to drive in, we were making good time until we came to stopped traffic outside the first tunnel going eastbound on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Traffic was pretty much stop and go after that point (we figure we were stopped outside the tunnel to prevent people from getting stuck inside the tunnel due to the bad traffic). The problems finally cleared up once the I-70 Baltimore/D.C. traffic veered off and we continued on I-76 to Philly. When we left at 9a, our GPS estimated that we'd arrive in Philly around 6:30p; instead, we arrived around 8:15p. Upon our arrival back to the city, we unloaded the car, ordered a pizza from Lazaro's, and soon after called it a night.
Our trip to Ohio was definitely a bit of a whirlwind, but it was great to catch up with both family and friends while we were there. And now that Thanksgiving is past us, I think we can officially start embracing the Christmas season. (I may have made D listen to way-too-many Christmas songs during the drive back home. And also, how have I never heard this song before? Jiggity-jig!) I think this weekend we may trek out somewhere to find an apartment-sized Christmas tree for our place in lieu of setting up my sad fake tree from Meijer circa 1998. Though it has been unseasonably warm around these parts (today temps were in the upper 60s), I am ready for candy canes, twinkling lights, snowflakes, and bucketloads of Christmas cookies. Bring on the holiday season!
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