When I looked at my blog I couldn’t believe that it’s been two years since I wrote a post!  It makes sense though when I think about what I’ve been up to since then.  In September 2010 I started an MBA program.  Then June 23, 2012 I got engaged.  May 19, 2012 I graduated with my MBA degree and June 23, 2012 I got married.  It’s been a busy two  years!

During that time I wasn’t able to do too much traveling, but over “Christmas break” this last year I went to Key West, FL with my husband and his family and after the wedding we went on a honeymoon to Maine.  More on those trips to come.

I have a favor to ask all of you out on the world wide web.  In 2008 when I was traveling in Europe with my friends one of the places we visited was Dublin, Ireland.  When I was there I saw some champagne flutes that I loved and thought would be absolutely perfect for a wedding.  At the time I wasn’t dating anyone but I bought them anyway and stashed them in my wedding “hope chest.”  I was able to use them for my wedding but at the end of the night one of them was missing.  I stressed to the reception hall staff how important these flutes were to me.  I also ended up emailing all of the guests to ask if anyone had seen it.  Sadly it never turned up.  I then tried to see if I could find them for sale online.  Finally I tried to contact Duiske Glass directly with no luck (I even sent them a letter in the mail).  It is the one thing about my wedding that really upsets me (even though in the grand scheme of things it is a very minor issue).

That is where you all come in (maybe, hopefully).  If anyone has these glasses or can find them I would be more than  happy to buy them from you and I would be incredibly grateful.  This is the info about the champagne flutes:

Duiske Glass
Claddagh
Green core flute
Set of 2
0032409

Bar code #: 5390576024810

They came in a yellow box and here is a photo:

They have a claddagh and the saying “Love, Loyalty, Friendship” etched into the flute.  The stem has a green core.

If anyone has or comes across these glasses and is willing to sell them to me please, please, please contact me: travelaholic@travelaholicanonymous.net

Thanks!

~The Travelaholic

I’m guessing that anyone who had been reading my blog has long since abandoned it… as I did.  I’m hoping to get  back into blogging my traveling adventures.  I’ve had a couple while I was away that I’ll fill everyone in on.

In general, my hiatus was sadly not due to traveling the world.  I was working on my MBA and planning my wedding.  Now that I have all of that out of the way I can get back to the important stuff.

~The Travelaholic

New York Supreme Court

I’ve finally seen it… the home of Friends, Law and Order, Sex and the City, Lady Liberty, Times’ Square, Wall Street, Broadway… the list goes on and on.  I’m so excited I’ve finally seen one of the biggest “tourist attractions” in the USA. Speaking of Law and Order, I have to start my post off with one of the most exciting sites I saw on the entire trip… the New York Supreme Court Building. You may recognize it from just about every episode of Law and Order.

My trip started out with a conference for work.  It was a good conference and I got to do a little site seeing around the sessions.  When we first got to Manhattan, we checked into the hotel and then took our first trek out into the city.  We ate lunch at a little cafe, then set out to see what we could see.  We saw the Empire State Building, but since we were tired from an early morning flight we decided not to go to the top.  We headed back to the hotel to relax a bit before the opening reception of the conference started.  It was neat because the opening reception was at the Museum of Modern Art (called MoMA by the locals).

The next day was pretty much all conference stuff, but that evening we had dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. It had an absolutely beautiful view of Central Park. Friday the conference ended at about 2 pm and from that point on my boyfriend and I were free to see the sites!

We started with a short walk to Times Square. It was a cool site to see! Well, I shouldn’t say cool, it was quite hot, in fact it was in the mid to upper 90s the whole time we were in NYC. We didn’t let the heat kill our spirit, but it sure did cook it a little bit.

After Times Square, we headed back to the hotel we had been staying at for the conference (the Grand Hyatt) and moved to about the worst place I’ve ever stayed in my life (Hotel Riverside Studios. Unfortunately the Hyatt was a little too rich for our blood, so we looked for somewhere less expensive to crash our last couple of nights in the city. I read the reviews on Expedia, and I was basically expecting a hostel. Now I’ve stayed in hostels all over the world, and I know about what to expect, but this place was terrible. At first it was fine, basically a hostel, but over the course of the two nights we were there it just kept getting worse. The first night we were there, the power went out to our room, and since the air conditioning was just a window unit, we were roasting our butts off. I went down to the front desk and they flipped the breaker for us. No big deal… BUT then the next night we were there, we had gone out to dinner and when we got back we couldn’t get the lock open to our room. We went down the front desk and they sent a “maintenance person” up to help us get the room open. We were sweating our butts off in the hallway waiting for the guy to come get our room open, and then when he finally got to the room he couldn’t get the door unlocked either (surprise, surprise). We asked if there were any open rooms that we could at least go to cool off. They said they had one open room. We went to that room and it was sweltering too. We cranked up the A/C and just sat there. We were waiting to get into our room, so we didn’t want to go anywhere or fall asleep there. Finally at 2:30 AM they came and told us they couldn’t get the lock open, so they just ripped it off the door (1. safe 2. super duper). We went up to our room and decided that we’d just chain it shut and sleep there. We didn’t want to screw around with packing up and moving all of our stuff for just one night (actually 1/4 of a night). And the hotel didn’t even offer to refund our money for that horrible night’s stay.

Sorry, I got a little side tracked there… Moral of the story… Don’t ever stay at the Hotel Riverside Studios!

Now let’s rewind back to Friday evening… after we checked into the hotel from hell we went in search of somewhere good to eat. We ended up eating at this little Irish Pub/Restaurant. It was kind of crazy, when we went into the restaurant the sun was shining and when we can out everything was soaked. Later that night when we watched the news we saw that we missed a torrential downpour and tornado warnings. We walked around the city a little more that night and then headed back to the hotel for the night.

The next day we set out for the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island bright and early. It was another hot day, so we wanted to try to get out to Liberty Island before it was 100 degrees. We took the subway all the way down to Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan to buy our tickets for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. Little did we know that you have to buy tickets well in advance if you actually want to go to the crown of the Statue of Liberty. The soonest they had available tickets for the crown was in November! So, let that be a lesson to any of you out there, if you want to go to the crown of the Statue of Liberty you better get your tickets super early!

Statue of Liberty

Our first look at Lady Liberty was from the ferry. It was really neat to see an icon that you’ve seen 100s of times in TV shows and movies up close and in person. When we got to Liberty Island we walked around and saw the Statue of Liberty even more close up. We checked out the gift shop, but other than the Statue, that’s about all there is to see on the island. After we were wore out from the heat we hopped back on the ferry and soaked up some A/C while exploring the Ellis Island Museum. That was another historic landmark that was super cool to see. It was crazy to read and see photos of what immigrants experienced when they arrived at Ellis Island. After several hours of exploring, we decided to head back to Manhattan on the Ferry.

Wall Street

We continued our day with a walk through the financial district. We did get to see the Wall Street and the Bull. It was kind of funny because the Bull seemed to be pretty easy to find, but we talked to someone the first night we were in NYC and they said they walked all over the financial district trying to find the Bull, but were never able to.

From there were took the subway to China Town and walked through China Town and then over to Little Italy. We had a delicious lunch at a little Italian resturaunt. It truly reminded me of being in Italy. That’s somewhere I’d really love to go back to, but that’s a topic for another post…

McSorley

We ended the afternoon with a stop at McSorley’s Old Ale House based on a tip my boyfriend got from a local New Yorker. It was a really cool old bar. The walls were covered with pictures, paintings, and all sorts of random stuff, the floor was covered with sawdust, and they served two kinds of beer – light and dark. You got two beers for $5, pretty darn cheap for NYC. The waiters sounded like true Irish people with thick Irish accents. After that we headed back to our hotel. Little did we know that would be the last time we would be in the room when it still had a lock on the door. We went out for dinner and then came back to the hotel room drama.

Tyrannosaurus Rex

The next day was our last day in New York. The only thing we really did was see the Natural History Museum. That place is huge! You could probably spend a whole week there if you really wanted to see everything. We started at the top with the dinosaur bones. That was really cool to see. We got some pictures with the extinct beasts. The t-rex was my favorite to see. After that we headed to the airport to bid farewell to the Big Apple. Overall it was a very fun trip and I would definitely recommend taking a trip over there if you haven’t.

~The Travelaholic

I’m super excited because I just found out that I get to go to NYC for a work conference in mid-July! I’ve never been to NYC, so even though I’m going for work, I’m excited to see if it lives up to my expectations based on Law and Order and Sex and the City… my two glimpses of the city.

I’m staying two extra days and my boyfriend is coming out to sight see with me, so hopefully we have enough time to take in a good share of the popular tourist attractions. Does anyone have any recommendations for NYC must-sees, must-dos, and/or must-eats? Any tips on what is a good neighborhood to stay in?

I have my flight booked by work and the hotel for the days I’ll be at the conference, but I need a recommendation of a good place to stay (reasonably safe and clean, but not too expensive, and is in a decent location… I know, simple, right?).

My boyfriend was able to get a really good deal on a flight out there from Expedia.com. They’re always my go to for a good deal.  I check around for the best rates, but it almost always seems like Expedia has them.  I wish we could find a good deal for a trip out to Las Vegas. We’ve been trying to book a trip out there with another couple just for fun, but it is so ridiculously expensive to fly out there now. At least we’re able to take a mini trip somewhere. I am definitely getting the travel itch big time! How about you? Itching to go anywhere? Have any travel plans waiting in the wings?

~The Travelaholic

I came across the below travel quote and it made me think of one of my trips to Barcelona.

The only way of catching a train I ever discovered is to miss the train before. 
~G.K. Chesterton

To give a little background to the story, three of my friends and I were in Barcelona as part of our study abroad spring break travels.  We got two weeks off of school starting with Holy Week or “Semana Santa”.  Two of my friends on the trip and I were all studying abroad in Spain and our friend Jenna came over to Spain from England, where she was studying abroad.

OK, now we’ll fast forward to the end of the Barcelona trip.  Our train back to Valladolid, Spain was leaving from Barcelona at noon.  Jenna and Corynn wanted to check out a museum that we didn’t get to on our trip, and Laura and I didn’t really care to see it, so we said we would get lunch for the train together and then meet them at the train station.

Laura and I were kind of lolly-gagging around the hostel as we made the lunches and cleaned everything up.  We decided it was getting late, so we better get going.  We consulted our map and thought it wasn’t very far to get to the train station, so we were just going to walk.  We definitely underestimated the scale of the map for Barcelona, and eventually decided that we had better take the metro to get to the train station in time for our train.  We ended up getting on the metro and had to change lines twice to get to the train station.  We were running through the metro stations in between lines and we still get to the tran station 10 minutes  AFTER our train left.  We double checked if the train had already left (we hoped there might be some random stroke of luck that would have delayed the train, but no such luck for us). 

We asked when the next train was leaving for Valladolid, and it wasn’t for another 10 hours!  (Plus the train ride is 10 hours long).  Not only did we miss our train, but we didn’t really have a way to get a hold of our friends to tell them what happened.  Jenna was studying in England, so she didn’t have a cell phone that worked in Spain and Corynn had lost her cell phone earlier in the semester.  I asked if we could get a message to our friends on the train (thinking the station would at least have radio communication with the train), but no dice.  We ended up buying tickets for that train and sat in the train station for the next ten hours waiting for that train because we certainly did not want to miss this one!

We ended up getting to Valladolid at about 8 am the next morning and when we did our friends were waiting for us at the train station and everything was just fine.  When we were sharing stories of our adventures of our 20 hours apart, Jenna told us that she asked for a sign, just to know that we were alright and she saw Cofradías pulling a statue of Jesus on the cross down the street.  She thought that meant we were dead for sure…

If you are not very familiar with Holy Week in Spain, that would probably be pretty startling.  Cofradías are dressed in long robes with pointed hoods that cover their faces.  They dress in various colors – black, red, blue, and white.  They cary candles and flags, and pull giant statues of the stations of the cross down the streets in huge processions.  It’s a crazy big site to see.

~The Travelaholic

I’m so excited! It’s going to be in the upper 70s – 80s this whole week! We had a cold spell the last two weeks or so before this, so these temperatures are feeling great! This past weekend we took advantage of the warm weather and went out boating and four wheeling. It was so nice to be out in the sun!

Yesterday I moved the lawn and watered the garden and my flowers. So far the only thing that’s come up in the garden is my raddishes. I’m hoping to buy some tomato, green pepper, and jalenpeno pepper plants and plant them tomorrow. I started a bunch of tomato, green pepper, and jalenpeno pepper seeds in starters in the house, but they either died or didn’t grow in the first place. Oh well, it was worth a try.

I really want to have a garden, so I can have all sorts of fresh vegetables all summer long. One of the things I miss dearly about Spain is access to fresh veggies all year long. That was honestly one of my favorite things about studying abroad there! I’m definitely getting the travel bug again, but I don’t have any trips planned at the moment. There are two possible trips in the hopper. One is a trip to Las Vegas for a long weekend, and the other is a road trip down to Florida. At this point I just hope one of those trips works out because I need to go somewhere stat!

~The Travelaholic

This coming weekend I think I’m going to end up taking another “staycation.” I’m going up to Gordon, WI to spend the weekend with my boyfriend. The plan is to brew another batch of homemade beer – Scottish Ale. We’ll probably do a little boating too.

I like the staycation weekends, but I really want to take some more real trips. We and another couple are talking about going to Las Vegas in June, but it so expensive then. I was looking and there are some really reasonable fares in September and October, but unfortuntely my boyfriend is a high school teacher, so we’re kind of limited to the summer months for traveling. It’s nice that he has all summer off, but I still have to work and then it makes it a lot tougher to do anything during the school year. Oh well, such is life I guess.

I’ll let you know how the staycation goes next week.

~The Travelaholic

Like I said the other day, unfortunately on my blogging hiatus I didn’t really do any major traveling.  I had my Miami trip, but that was about it.  I did do a lot of “staycationing” during that time though.  I’m a born and raised Wisconsinite, but in my 25 years thus far I’ve never been smelting in the far reaches of northern Wisconsin.  I’ve had smelt (fish) before, and I’m not a big fan, but I had to experience the wonder that is smelting.

My boyfriend is from Ashland, WI originally, so he grew up with the smelting phenomenon.  One weekend he told me that the smelt were running in Ashland and he talked with one of his college friends about going smelting who had never been either and asked if I wanted to come too.  I said “sure,” so the three of us gathered the gear, jumped in the truck, and ventured northward.

We got up to Ashland around supper time and stopped at the South Shore Brewery for a bite to eat a couple of their excellent microbrews! We stocked up the cooler and headed over to my boyfriend’s aunt and uncle’s house to set-up for smelting.

I tried to find a good description of smelting, but neither eHow or Wikipedia really captured smelting, so here’s my “how to” for smelting…

First Smelting Adventure

1. Fill your cooler with ice and plenty of beer.
2. Find a good spot on the beach to set-up camp for smelting.
3. Build a big fire on the beach.
4. Have a drink or two.
5. Put on some hip waders (and hope they don’t have any holes) because Lake Superior in April is COLD!
6. Walk out into the lake with someone else and a big net, called a seine, held up over your head.
7. Stretch the seine out between the two of you and walk slowly towards shore bouncing the net on the bottom of the lake.
8. Haul your smelt into shore and put them in buckets.
9. If this is your first time smelting you will be “required” to bite the head off a smelt. Oh yes, I did it and there is photographic evidence as you can see.
10. Have a couple more drinks and repeat.

Wow, this is turning into quite the blog post, and I didn’t even get to talk about why I named it the way I did. I remember hearing this song on the radio all the time when I was little called Smelting USA by Da Yoopers (think Surfin’ USA by the Beach Boys), and never really knew what smelting was. But now I know what smelting is (and you do too)!

~The Travelaholic

It’s not quite that bad, but we just got SNOW in MAY!  We had such an unseasonably warm March and April that I’ve been itching to plant my vegetable garden and flower beds, but I’m sure glad I didn’t!  The inside of my house is starting to look like a green house though.  I have small tomato and green pepper plants in starter containers, just planted strawberries and cat grass, and have some corn, green beans, yellow squash, zucchini, watermelon, pumpkin, and cucumber seeds in containers with a damp paper towel to get them germinating.

There’s always something when you’re trying to garden though.  If it isn’t the weather, it’s the animals.  I was so mad this morning when I walked outside and found my newly planted rhubarb chewed off and a hole dug in the ground where the root should be.  I think it must have been a squirrel.  I hate squirrels anyway.  They’re such creepy, rodent creatures. 

Brady the Troublemaker

And even the animals I love are trying to sabotage my gardening.  I put my tomato and pepper starters on my refrigerator because I thought that was the only place in my house that my cats didn’t climb on.  Boy was I wrong!  I saw my cat Brady sitting on the fridge one day and when I tried to chase him off, he decided to rub up against my fragile little tomato plants.  Now I have all the rest of my starters on the fridge, so I sure hope Brady doesn’t try to get up there.  I will not be happy if he dumps all of my starters and germination containers off the fridge.

Oh well, it sounds like this weekend and next week will start to warm up so I should be able to get all of my plants outside.  Then I’ll just have to worry about the outside animals and weather.  It’s always something…

~The Travelaholic

I’m trying to get back on track with my blogging, but before I can do that, I need to backtrack a little over the last year…

Last summer I was the lucky winner of a trip to Miami to see Katy Perry! I won the trip from a local radio station by being the 500th person to text in the keyword which happened to be speedo.

Katy Perry Concert

The trip was for me and a guest and since I hate picking one person over another I told my friends that they’d have to rock-paper-scissors to be my guest. Two of my friends really wanted to go, so what we ended up doing was having one of them be my official guest and the two of split the cost of a plane ticket so they both could go. It actually worked out a lot smoother than I thought! The Katy Perry concert was right at the Fontainebleau, the hotel we were staying at, so it was pretty easy for us to all get in for the concert.

The picture to the left is of Katy Perry and her band and you can see the Fontainebleau in the background.  The concert was a lot of fun!  There was just standing room on a grassy area in front of the stage, so we were relatively close to the stage.  After the concert there were all sorts of fun hors d’oeuvres.

The trip was only a long weekend… I think it was a Friday through a Sunday, but that was plenty!  The trip was from July 31 – August 2, and that time of year in Miami is HOT!  (Especially for us, since we’re from Wisconsin).  We pretty much had to go from AC to the pool or ocean and back again.  The first day we were there we wanted to explore South Beach a bit, so we went to the shopping district.  We had a late lunch and some mojitos.  Then we pretty much bounced from store to store to to be in the AC. 

That night we wanted to go to club LIV which is located right inside the hotel, so we asked the concierge what the dress code was, how tough it was to get in, etc. He said it was pretty tough to get in, that the bouncer selected the “best dressed” to get in. Yikes! So we went up to our room and plotted our outfits. When we came back down to the lobby and decided to have a drink at the Bleau Bar to take a little of the edge off trying to get into the club.

We ended up talking to some business man and when we told him that we were planning to try to get into club LIV that night he told us he knew the manager and would get us in. We ended up waiting for him for awhile, but then when he didn’t come back right away, we thought he was just talking big, but didn’t actually know the manager, so we got in line. He ended up finding us in line and we got right in ahead of the huge crowd waiting in line (I guess he actually did know the manager).

The drinks in the club were really pricey ($15). This probably doesn’t seem like a lot if you live in a big city, but us Wisconsin girls are used to $2 beers. Unfortunately we don’t have any photographic evidence of the club because we ended up having too much fun and not even thinking to take pictures. This is especially a bummer because aparently Miley Cyrus and posse were turned away from that very same club! It was because she was underage, but still, she was turned away and we got in.

I didn’t even talk much about the fancy-pants hotel, but the one thing I need to mention is that the mini bar had censors in it, so if you even picked up the items you got charged for them! We didn’t know that right away, and let’s be honest, what’s the first thing you do when you get up to your hotel room? Explore and investigate! So of course we looked at everything in the mini bar. Then about 15 minutes later, the bellman came up with our bags and told us about the mini bar. Oooops! We didn’t end up getting charged when I went down to checkout because they asked if we had anything from the mini bar and I said no, so they probably guessed we didn’t know that the mini bar would charge you if you looked at the items. 

I hope I’m that lucky again to win another trip! That, or I’ll just settle for winning the lottery.

~The Travelaholic