Bree’s 6th grade class leaves very early in the morning for a class trip to a famous Shakespeare festival in Ashland, OR. At night they see a performance of “As You Like It”. Over the next few days, they’ll see two modern (not Shakespeare) shows, and also go on a white-water rafting trip down Oregon’s Rogue River.
Our family has essentially zero interest in the sports entertainment industry, so it’s been a very long time since any of us have attended a professional sports game of any kind. But today Jan’s friend Bruce has an extra ticket for the Seattle Sounders soccer match against Minnesota United, and Jan decides to go. He meets up with Bruce and his friend Stephanie for lunch at Tat’s in Pioneer Square, and then they walk to the stadium. They end up walking just in front of the Emerald City Supporters, an enormous group of super-enthusiastic Sounders fans, who are singing and chanting while marching from Pioneer Square to the stadium.
It’s a beautiful sunny afternoon for a game. Seattle wins, 2–1.
Jan, Liya, and Bree go out to eat at Cafe Lago. It’s one of Bree’s favorite restaurants, and she always orders the gnocchi with tomato vodka cream sauce. The waitress sets down our orders, attends to another table, then comes back to check in with us. “How are those first bites tastin—” She stares at Bree’s plate. “That… That’s nearly empty.”
Bree’s 6th grade class helps cook meals for a local women’s shelter.
We all head to the East Coast for Anya’s Parents’ Weekend at Choate. Jan leaves a day before Angela, Liya, and Bree so that he can visit Marlee first. His flight gets into Newark late Wednesday, so he’d looked for a place to stay not far from the airport. It turns out that his hometown of Maplewood, NJ, is pretty close, and there’s a B&B in town that’s just around the corner from a house he and Chris had lived in when they were little.
In the morning, Jan goes for a walk around Borden Park. His childhood home on Orchard Road had sat at the edge of this park. Jan looks for the brook that he and Chris had played in as boys. He’s surprised to discover that the brook is gone. The entire brook has been replaced with a sewer pipe which has been covered over with grass. He takes this photo while standing on top of where the brook once ran. The only evidence the brook was ever there is the sewer grate and the remnants of a stone bridge that once spanned the brook.
The owner of the B&B where Jan’s staying makes him breakfast. While they’re talking, Jan mentions that he’d lived in the neighborhood a long time ago. “Oh? What street?” asks the owner. “Orchard Road”, says Jan. “Really? What house?”, the owner asks. “53.” The owner is stunned. “That’s where I lived when I got out of college!” The owner even lived in the same upstairs apartment, about 10 years before Jan lived there. The two spend some time recalling the apartment’s interior, and both find it amusing that someone else knows the details of the other’s prior home.
Jan drives up to Pleasantville to see his step-sister, Anne. They spend some time catching up at Anne’s house, then make the short drive up the Hudson to see Marlee at the memory care facility where she lives. When Anne says, “Marlee, look who’s here!”. When Marlee sees Jan, she lights up and says, “Well, I’m going to have a good day!” And it is, in fact, a good visit.
Jan drives up to Choate to meet Anya. Anya’s going great in her senior year, with a full slate of challenging classes and a good set of friends. Jan takes Anya and two of her friends, Niko and Aarathi, out to dinner at a Chinese hot pot restaurant. Over dinner, the three girls talk about the imminent deadline for early college applications.
Angela, Liya, and Sabriya arrive in the morning, and we all meet up on the Choate campus to go through Anya’s class schedule with her.
We’re very happy that this year’s Parents’ Weekend fell on Anya’s birthday. She’s 18!
While Jan and Bree go through more of Anya’s class schedule in the morning, Angela and Liya make the short drive to New Haven to tour Yale. We meet up at a spicy Sichuanese restaurant for lunch, then drive to New York City. We check into the Park Terrace Hotel off Bryant Park. When we head out for dinner later, it’s clear that it’ll be impossible to catch a taxi to the restaurant. We end up taking pedicabs, which is fun — although we realize we foolishly forgot to negotiate a rate before we got on, so when we get off we pay an extortionary fare.
Dinner at ABC Cocina is delicious. Anya ends up running into another girl from Choate there; many families have come down to NYC like we have.
After dinner, we walk to the Orpheum Theater to see “Stomp!”. Angela and Jan show the percussion show years ago when it came through Seattle, but it’s fun to see it again, and all of us have a great time.
We spent a few hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In the early afternoon, we head downtown to The Strand bookstore. After spending time shopping for books, we go outside to wait for the beginning of an outdoor puzzlehunt we signed up for. At 3:00 pm, an actor who’s part of the puzzlehunt gives the secret signal — a squawking bird call — and we step forward along with another family group of 5. The actor gives his spiel, and gives us an easy puzzle to solve as we make our way to the next clue location a few blocks away. The puzzlehunt is mildly amusing, but the clues are far too easy, the actors keep giving us too many hints before we can even look at the clues. It doesn’t help that it keeps pouring rain as we walk around Greenwich Village following the clues. The game finally ends at a bar, and we’re happy to get out of the rain.
Dinner is at Bubby’s, a decent American restaurant. Jan had picked it because it was one of only a few restaurants in New York that offer banoffee (banana + toffee) pie, one of Anya’s favorites.
We drive Anya to the Newark train station, and snap a family selfie before she heads back to Choate and we head to the airport.
We drive out to Hawthorne, NJ, to visit our friends Owen and Nicole. We catch up with them at their home, then have a nice Italian lunch together.
Liya’s cross-country team runs in the Emerald City League league championship at Lincoln Park in West Seattle. Liya runs a great race and finishes 7th, putting her in the top 15 runners who receive ribbons. The girls team does very well overall. The teams gather after the races are over to hear the final results. An announcer says that Overlake took third place. They then begin to announce that the second place team is The Northwest School, and Liya’s team goes completely nuts — because this means that they won first place. The Northwest School has a strong team that has won the championship year after year; this is the first time since 2006 that Liya’s school has won.
Happy Halloween! Bree goes to her friend Hazel’s house to trick-or-treat. Bree dresses in a sort of Asian sorceress/ninja costume she assembled with Angela’s help. A key part of the costume was Bree learning how to put her hair up in chopsticks, which she can then whip out dramatically for use as weapons.