Honeymoon in Hawaii

Our trip to Kauai was soooooooo beautiful and we finally put up our pictures! Check them out at our new PicasaWeb account: http://picasaweb.google.com/jenn.c.taylor/HoneymoonInKauai

Summer Road Trip 2005!

Hi Everyone!

Chris and I have finished our second week of work at Google, and our epic, 5,000-mile, 19-state, 6-week road trip adventure is already beginning to seem like a distant memory, but I promised that I would post some pictures and share all our fun stories, so that's why I'm starting this blog! To summarize, we had an AWESOME time, did some crazy things, and of course, had some crazy things happen to us!

P.S. A close runner-up for the title of this blog was "Thinking with Scissors -- How I Poked Out My Mind's Eye."

P.P.S. Apologies in advance for the grainy quality of these pictures. It's partially the fault of our old crappy camera, and partially the fault of Blogger JPEG compression. If you'd like, I can send you the original copies from my computer, which are significantly better.

P.P.P.S. Click on the "Satellite Image" link after each post. They're pretty cool.

Cambridge, MA - The Journey Begins!

You might expect that we would be bubbling with energy and excitement on the first day, but in actuality, we were still reeling from moving everything out of the apartment.

Before:
After:

I don't think we would have made it at all if Andrew and Tony hadn't pitched in. (Thanks again guys!)

The night before we left, we were busy packing until 4 in the morning, at which point we realized that we had no beds to sleep on. On the other hand, we did learn two priceless Gems of Wisdom (+3) for the long journey ahead:

1. Hotel reservations are for sissies.
2. Hotels give you great discounts if you check in at 4 a.m.

Satellite Map

Philadelphia, PA (Part I) - Our First Ever Parking Ticket

In 7 years of driving, I have never gotten a parking ticket, but what can I say -- our stinginess with quarters got us burned in Philadelphia. The parking meter ran out by about 20 minutes while Chris and I were getting coffee with Colette. It figures that we would get caught. Unfortunately, we didn't get any pictures in Philly, but we are still curious what this shiny prism-shaped building is for:

It's brand new, and it allegedly belongs to Amtrak, but isn't Amtrak bankrupt? What could they possibly fill it with? Broken Acela trains?

Satellite Image

North Potomac, MD (Part I) - Baseball, Birds, & XBoxes

We had a lot of fun visiting Chris's family in Maryland. We caught up on sleep, pigged out on good food, and generally relaxed.

• We played some 4-player baseball, where I tried my best Jason Varitek imitation at the plate (you know how he taps the instep of each foot before each pitch?), but when it came time to hit, let's just say that I made Mark Bellhorn look real, real good.

• There's a lot of neat wildlife in the backyard, including deer and a pretty pair of cardinals. I'd never seen a real cardinal before, and up close, they're fascinatingly red. (Yeah, duh, right?) Anyways, I learned that almost all birds love black-oiled sunflower seeds, and reports indicate that they are currently getting quite fat from the feeder I set up.

• Lastly, we spent a good deal of time playing an XBox game called Jade Empire. It's an RPG where our character, a "spirit monk," fights a lot of ghosts, deposes a couple of corrupt emperors, and rescues the Water Dragon, a goddess. It made me feel much closer to Rebecca and her research. No really, we had a great discussion about the similarities between this game and the political undercurrents in 7th- and 8th-century Chinese poetry.

Satellite Image