Had a good visit home back to Springfield, IL. Great to see all of the friends and family, and to be reminded of the important priorities in life good friends, family, and health.

Erin has also written a far better blog post than I could ever write about Argentina, so go read about Our trip to Argentina.

Photos from the trip so far

We had a great time at Emily and Dillon’s wedding in Estes Park, CO. I uploaded my photo’s to flickr. So click here to see my phtoto’s of Emily and Dillon’s wedding. 

Erin made a great post about all the things we have been up to in DC. It is a great post if you will be visiting DC and are looking for things to do. Also, since I haven’t posted anything it will serve as a great post to keep you up to date on what I’m up to these days.

visiting tourist destinations in DC

Total cost of gas + snacks + drinks + meals + etc = $249.93
View Larger Map But now we are in DC, we finished apartment shopping and will have a nice little place near Eastern Market. Unfortunately to get our parking pass, we have to get DC licenses, register the car in DC, and then get some city section parking permit to park by our place. We also need to get parking passes for our moving pods, so we still have a lot of moving hassles to deal with before we can really be settled in.’ Progress and at least I found a fun part of the city that I like.

We have more pictures as well, but we went on a day trip to another island in the DR. That day we bought a cheap underwater camera and took a bunch of pictures. These are the pictures from that camera. The pictures that look like they are just pictures of the ocean are actually of dolphins which you can sort of make out in a couple of the shots.

This year I was lucky enough to get to spend some time with my girlfriend over Valentines day. I headed out to NYC the Thursday before the holiday, and stayed over the weekend and we had a busy but amazing time… I will try to share some of the highlights but I am sure my words and pictures won’t do justice to the joy that the trip brought me.

I arrived about 4 hours late, due to delays from high winds. It was one of the scariest landings I have ever experienced. It turns out it was a bad day to fly as another plane in NYC actually crashed. After arriving late we had a chill evening and tried to get to bed at a reasonable hour because Erin had classes the next day and I had some work to do.

The next night we met up after Erin was done with classes and walked around the city enjoying the sunset. We then went to see her friend perform in The Vagina Monologues, which I had never seen. It had been on my list for some time just because you always here about it. Parts of the play were amazingly funny, other parts were sad, and some still just reminded me how women and men still see some sort of competition between each other… On more than one occasion I felt like I had a need to defend myself, but everyone is free to share their thoughts and it was interesting to say the least. Some scenes still cause me to laugh when I think about them. After the play we headed out for a evening of wine and appetizers.

Saturday we decided to spend Valentines day at the most romantic place on earth, Ellis Island. Waking early (well early for us), we took a train for about an hour then got on a ferry headed to the Statue of Liberty. Since you can’t actually go up inside the statue anymore, we didn’t even get off at the first stop. You get as good of view from the boat as you would at her toes, and I was all disappointed about not finally being able to get inside a woman’s head.

So we got off at the second stop to check out the Ellis Island history museum. Since Erin is all into history this was like Disney world for her… hehe We watched a movie there and learned a bunch of interesting facts about immigration. I found Roland Mayer in the database of people that went through the island, which may or may not be a late relative of mine. I learned that Erin’s family was apparently to rich and awesome at the time and didn’t have to go through the island as rich people’s immigration was dealt with on the ship… haha

The city as a backdrop as we ride the ferry back to the city.

We then used the awesome iPhone app Urbanspoon to find a delicious place on the water to grab a late lunch. I like Urbanspoon when I am other places, but the app is simple amazing when you are in NYC, it guides most of our restaurant choices when we are there and we always find great spots for a meal.

That night Erin had gotten us tickets to see Jazz at the Rose Theater from her school. For the price it was an exceptional deal. We enjoyed the show although we left a little early because the second group wasn’t as good as the first in our opinion. The funniest part of Jazz was that the host of the show was Wendell Pierce, AKA Bunk from The Wire. The Wire is probably the second best show I have ever watched.

After the show we wanted to grab some wine and quick appetizers while looking for somewhere to eat dinner. We ended up finding Clo wine bar, which was hilariously stupid and fun for me. I am a tech nerd and had heard all about these various table top technologies that allow people to interact with the image on the table. Clo was a uselessly funny merger of technology and wine. The wine list is projected on the table and by doing incredibly unnatural motions on the table you can select the wines you would like to try. In theory you then go self serve yourself glasses of wine from the wine pumping machines, but we were having none of this and had our choices brought to us. Erin could barely make the table top work and it frustrated the hell out of her, I found that hilarious but had to agree the technology was just plain bad. Since I am a nerd I really enjoyed paying $11 a glass of wine just to try out the technology which was far worse than a wine book that includes reviews and descriptions. We did enjoy a little appetizer as well which was good. Below you can see that even after you get your wine and food there is really no way to get ride of the image being projected onto your table, which becomes annoying.

While enjoying our wine we were looking up what options existed near by for dinner on Urbanspoon. We ended up at Gabriel’s, which awesomely enough “Bunk” had also decided to go to for dinner. I couldn’t resist quickly taking a really bad picture on my phone. After that I figured I should just try to ignore him and let him enjoy his night out. It was hard to ignore him when he laughed as his laugh was instantly recognizable. The dinner we had was amazing, and I would highly recommend restaurant, we had some great food. We really enjoyed this part of the evening.

After that we quickly tried a nearby club hoping to get some dancing in on valentines day, but that wasn’t in the cards. The club was kind of seedy, and for some reason they wouldn’t serve us gringos drinks. I guess perhaps since we were the minority in the club they thought we would be bad tippers, whatever after 30 minutes of failed attempts at getting a drink we headed home to dance to music playing on Erin’s iTunes.

Sunday Erin and I enjoyed breakfast in bed. We then sat around reading the news and chatting a bit. Taking care of little odds and ends for awhile. Erin finished up a paper that was due Monday, while I took care of some work. We then headed out to do some shopping. Erin and I were buying each other Valentines day gifts while we were in town together. Erin first took me to a hat shop and picked me out my awesome new hat. She then picked me up a nice bottle of port. After that we went a few places. I ended up buying Erin a pair of shoes at Kenneth Cole, you can see her trying on tons of shoes in the picture below. We then then went and picked up some other clothes for Erin, before realizing that there was no way we could make it home to shower and still make our dinner reservation.

We moved the reservation as late as we were allowed and still made it a few minutes late, going straight from shopping. We went to a vegetarian all you can eat restaurant called Vatan. It was fantastic, I am now saying it is the best Indian food I have ever had. The food came as little tiny portions of everything they made, and then after trying and sampling you could simple ask for more of any dish. I thought that out of trying 15-20 Indian dishes I would end up liking 4 or 5. I was completely amazed when I think I really liked nearly every dish, with only perhaps a single dish that I didn’t like. We enjoyed sharing some odd Indian beers while eating the food and trying to track down which ones were spicy and causing our mouths to melt. This was simply an amazing dinning experience and it was cheap considering NYC restaurant standards. It should be on any Indian food loving persons must try list.

After leaving the restaurant we headed to Hair Party 24 hours which we had seen on the way to the restaurant. Erin had been saying all day she would love a pedicure, which seemed like a great Valentines day gift. So finding a nice place to get her a pedicure at 11:30pm seemed perfect. She enjoyed her pedicure in a message chair with a glass of wine. I enjoyed just hanging out in the massage chair next to her with my own glass of wine chatting away. It was one of those moments where only in NYC can you have a desire at nearly midnight and find that your desire can be fulfilled around the corner.

We then enjoyed a quite Monday just hanging out, grocery shopping, and making dinner together. Overall the trip was amazing, we both had a blast and it was great to get to share the holiday with Erin. I must say NYC is a great place to spend Valentines day, I think I am learning to enjoy the city a bit more each time that I visit.

Continuing to catch up with long over due posts, here is a post about our ski trip to Dillon.

Erin and I wanted to enjoy a quick little get away while she was around over Xmas break. We looked into trying to do a cheap short ski trip. Normally we have ended up staying in Breck, but with our budgets a bit tighter we searched around for some other option. We ended up finding a great little place in Dillon.

The location distance to ski resorts was great. We ended up skiing one day at Keystone and one day at Copper. Our place was very nice and only cost $100 a night, which at nearly peak ski season is pretty amazing. It had a fully decked out kitchen, and access to a community hot tub and pool. The only problem was we wanted to go out to dinner one night, but couldn’t really manage it. Getting to town and back via a cab was nearly impossible ($100), we were to far to walk, and we wanted to be able to have drinks with dinner so we didn’t want to drive.

The Dillon trip was planned quickly and worked out amazingly well. It also got me thinking that I really haven’t spread the word of VRBO enough. The site has been amazing every time I have used it. In fact I think I have started to take it for granted. I mean if I use Ebay, I carefully check out the seller and I am very careful to make sure I am not getting scammed. Any Ebay transaction makes me nervous. On VRBO things have gone so well that I barely even check out the rentals anymore. I contact them get a price quote and then send in my deposit weeks or months early via paypal or check without a second thought. It has never failed me, I have never had anything remotely close to a problem or a scam. In fact I have never been disappointed with how it has worked out.

Erin is a huge fan of the sun, she claims to still worship the sun god, with that in mind we found a place with a nice deck, check out our view and check out Erin enjoying the view.

Frontier lost my bags for 5 days over xmas break. They managed to get my bags with all of my clothes and xmas gifts to me about 13 hours before I left town to head back to Denver. The crazy part is that my bags spent 5 days only 1.5 hours away from me in St Louis.

So I am pretty upset with Frontier Airlines. The basic story is that I left from Denver airport on a direct flight to St Louis on Dec 22nd. Somehow even though I was 2.5 hours early for my flight my luggage didn’t get on the plane. I arrive in STL and I am told they will send my bags later that evening because my bags should arrive on the next flight from DIA landing at 6:30pm. I am picked up in STL and off to Springfield, IL after leaving the address I will be at and even discussing that this is in Springfield.

They decided they could ship it via a shuttle service. I call later and that shuttle service had no more trips after my bag arrived. They told me it would go the next morning. Late the next day I call and they realize oh whoops they forgot about the bag, but they would Fedex it in the morning. It didn’t go to Fedex until the next evening (6PM), at which point I was moving from one house to another with a different address. It sat in Fedex STL for a day and a half and arrived the evening before I left. Just in time for me to unpack some gifts (some for people that had already left after the holidays) and for me to repack gifts I received. I head back to STL on the 28th bringing my bag back to the airport and city where it had spent the majority of the trip.

Seriously how could Frontier screw up so bad! I was one city away… Hell if they would have told me they couldn’t deliver a bag for 5 days, I would have drove there and picked it up myself. It can’t get a bag to someone that is only an hour and a half away from the bag for FIVE FREAKIN DAYS!

One of the many times I called about my bag, I finally called customer service to file a complaint. Frontier gave me a $25 travel voucher… Seriously? $25 dollars didn’t even cover the BAG FEES I now have to pay when I fly with checked lugged ($15 each way totaling $30). Frontier, I want all my bag fees reimbursed, ALL of them for anytime since the bag fee existed… Since I normally refuse to fly with checked luggage it wouldn’t even set you back much… Flying has become one of my most hated activities, partly because of the horrible treatment of the airlines. Partly because of the TSA.

All I wanted for Xmas was for the TSA to stop making me take my shoes off to fly, but instead I had such a horrible travel experience that I hate all the airlines. Frontier was my favorite airline, hell I even have a Frontier credit card (the one with the cute ass penguins). Now I am furious at them and hate the idea of flying with them.

I believe this leaves me with JetBlue who has given me some serious delays and lost my luggage (they got it back to me the next day), but has never wronged me… So yippie for you JetBlue you are now the airline I dislike the least. Frontier you went from the only airline I liked to being the worst of the bunch and nearly ruining my holiday…