Mmmm...Farmer's Market

California's oldest Farmer's Market is a mere 10 minute bus ride from our new home. Its a fantastic place, full of produce, tasty food and, as its a pre-yuppie institution, its the most down-to-Earth Farmer's Market either one of us has visited.

Chris' trip to DC

I (Chris) spent 2/3 of Memorial Day weekend in Washington DC visiting my sister. We had a great time. We toured around the White House, saw the Articles of Confederation, enjoyed a perfect May afternoon in outdoor cafes in Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan and visited a fantastic Farmer's Market/ Flea Market on Capitol Hill.

Here are a few photos of our trip.

Georgetown canal...looks almost like Holland.


Chinatown. Sweet!


The Old Post Office. Has great views of the city from the tower.


View of the Washington Monument from the Old Post Office tower.

Trading places

Last week Olivia was in Minneapolis visiting her sister... This week
I'm in DC visiting my sister while on my way home from NYC. Its nice,
a perfect time to be in our nation's Capitol. Its great to travel and
see family but we're looking forward to posting our weekend events
together next week. Here is a picture of Manhattan as seen from my
airplane window.

Chris' weekend in SF

While Olivia spent the weekend in "the Cities" (aka Minneapolis and Saint Paul) I explored our new San Francisco home. On Friday I went to a Giants game with Casey and Dipa. The White Sox won.



On Saturday I rode my bike to the ocean. We live on the exact opposite side of the city from the beach and there are several mountains between our home and the ocean, but San Francisco bikers have identified a route from the Mission to the Panhandle that effectively avoids all hills called "The Wiggle". I took the wiggle to the park and in under 40 minutes, I was at Ocean Beach, which was much faster than I was expecting. San Francisco is a pretty small place in terms of actual distances. That windmill looked so familiar I had to take a photo.



More ocean views.



From there I rode around the peninsula, through the Presidio, under the Golden Gate Bridge, through Fisherman's Wharf and along the Embarcadero back to our flat in Potrero Hill. It was a fun ride on a beautiful day.

Baseball!

Casey, Dipa and I are at a baseball game.

From Chicago to Madison

We took the train from Chicago to Milwuakee and had a quick lunch with Olivia's parents at the best Chinese restaurants in Wisconsin. We then borrowed one of their cars to join Diane and Bryant for their wedding celebrations.





We had a fantastic time at the wedding and a great time seeing all of our friends in the lovely city of Madison.

From Holland to Chicago

We returned from Europe to Chicago. We kept busy whilst in the city of wind.

We visited our friends Lee and Brian,



had lunch with Nick and Jessamyn and toured Nothwestern's beautiful campus,



and met Craig and Stacey's new daughter and Samantha's new sister Lexi.

Quick European Vacation

We took a quick trip to Holland and Belgium over the weekend. A few facts about our trip:

-We shot 631 photos
-The dollar is at 1.60 against the Euro
-Number of one-way road driven the wrong way in our SMART car: at least 4 (possibly more)
-We had a great time
-Curiously, we experienced little to no jet-lag

On Thursday we arrived in Amsterdam and admired the canals.



The next day we explored the city. Olivia wanted to swim in Amsterdam's canals. We also went the the Van Gogh museum.



We then drove a SMART car to the lovely Belgian city of Bruges. Our decision to drive a car instead of taking the train was a new one for us. It was driven primarily by our interest in using the time we had in Europe to its fullest (the train is slower than driving). Plus, Chris had always wanted to road trip in Europe. In fact, driving a car in Europe was a lot of fun. Its not all the different from road-tripping in the US. Drivers are roughly as aggressive as in the Bay Area, freeways are about as congested, especially in Belgium. The differences are that there are no road signs in the city centers (or so it seemed) and there is little to no country music on the radio. Luckily we had a SMART car, so we could go anywhere (and we did...see facts about our trip above)



Bruges, too has canals:


The spring flowers were beautiful.



We then drove to Ghent, another medieval wonder:



Ghent had a very classic castle that we enjoyed touring very much:



The following day we drove back to the Netherlands and stopped in Leiden:



We woke the following morning and rented bikes to explore Holland's tulip region. We pedaled past fields of tulips. It was beautiful.





We have a photo album of more of our pictures from this trip which can be found here (soon).

We made a separate photo album of our flower photos (link soon!) because we took so many and they were so pretty.