A Visit from the Cincinnati Mowry's

The weekend of July 24th, Charlie's parents and sister came to visit us in Jersey! We had lots of things planned for the weekend and they even helped us finish some projects around the house too.

After a little bit of drama with their flight, they arrived safely at the LaGuardia Airport Thursday afternoon. I drove in to pick them up, which was my first time driving into the city by myself.... it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. We came across a little bit of traffic getting onto the George Washington Bridge but overall, it wasn't too bad. So Thursday night, Charlie and I took them down to Hoboken, New Jersey for the 100th Annual St. Ann's Festival. The festival is a really popular italian street festival that had lots of food vendors and Jay and the Americans were the entertainment. For those of you that may not know, they were a pretty popular band in the 60's ...probably their biggest hit is "Come a little bit Closer". Strangely enough there were not as many "italian" food vendors as we thought there would be at an "italian festival" but we did wait in the long line for the famous "zeppoles", which tasted similar to funnel cake.

On Friday, Charlie went to a KPMG Volunteer Event for the day. And Tom, Leslie and Abby helped me do some things around the house. We got lots of yard work done and cleaned out the garage. Friday evening, we all went out to a nice steak dinner at The River Palm Restaurant located in the neighboring town, Mahwah.

Saturday, we took the train into the City. We saw The Addams Family Musical on Broadway, which had Nathan Lane and Lillith from Cheers starring as Gomez and Morticia. The musical was really cute and would highly recommend it. After the show, we went to the King Tut exhibit in Times Square. Maybe I should have already known this, but I had no idea that King Tut died at 19 years old. His remains are still in Egypt but the exhibit had lots of burial objects that were found in his tomb including the coffinettes that contained his mummified organs. For dinner, we took a cab down to Lombardi's Pizza near Little Italy. Lombardi's claims that they are the very first pizzeria in America starting business in NYC in 1905. And anyone that hasn't tried this pizza, it is a must. It is definitely my new favorite pizza (move over Plank's! ).

Sunday morning we woke up and went to brunch at one of Jersey's diners. Diners may have become extinct along time ago in Ohio, but Jersey has kept these blasts from the past alive and there are so many too choose from. We chose the State Line Diner which did not disappoint.

After filling our tummies with greasy eggs and bacon, we drove 45 minutes north to the West Point Academy and toured the grounds and cemetery, which had beautiful views of the mountains and Hudson River.

And last but definitely not least, Abby and Tom helped Charlie put together our long over due grill which was a wedding present 2 years ago. We were never able to use it in our condo in Columbus, so we were really excited to find a house with a nice back-yard and porch to start grilling. Once the grill was put together, Charlie enjoyed finally being able to fire it up and we had some delicious marinated chicken and hamburgers.

Overall, it was a great visit from the Cincinnati Mowry's, lots of fun and lots of help in getting us settled.