We travel to San Francisco for a quick trip so Jan can attend a web developer’s conference tomorrow. We follow transit directions from the airport into the city, which eventually take us onto a cable car.
While Jan’s busy at a conference dinner, Angela travels down to Stanford to take Evan out to dinner with his good friends Jane, Yayo, and Kaila.
Over dinner, the young adults consider the question: “When did your parents meet?” Angela met Jan when she was 23 — the same age Evan will turn later this month.
Jan has breakfast with Matt, a friend from his days at Cozi, at Home Plate in the Marina district. It’s been a long time since the two friends have had a chance to get together.
Jan meets back up with Angela at the hotel, and then we spend a few hours in downtown San Francisco: a K-Pop art exhibit at the Asian Art Museum, lunch at a Venezuelan street food restaurant, and some shopping at Peak Design and Allbirds.
Angela’s brother Johnny comes up from L.A. for the weekend. Johnny’s here to see a Clippers preseason basketball game and Angela joins him for the game. The Clippers eke out a last-second victory.
Since Johnny’s in town for the weekend, Angela organizes a small Chen reunion over dim sum at Triumph Valley in Renton. (From left to right: Jan, Johnny, Angela, Susana, Ty, Leslie, and Eddie.) We’ve been meaning to try the restaurant for a while, and the dim sum is indeed quite good.
We fly to the East Coast for Bree’s parents weekend, which will be followed by a family gathering in New York City.
The flight to Newark is fine, then we take the train to New York Penn Station. There we have just enough time to grab a dinner to eat on the train before boarding our train to New Haven. Jan grabs a “Gothamist” sandwich from Alidoro that’s amazing.
Jan is disappointed but not surprised that Amtrak still has the same dumb announcement system: instead of listing what track a train will be on ahead of time, the station waits until the last minute to announce the track number. A huge crowd of people stands impatiently in the train station hall listening for their train. When our train’s track is announced, hundreds of people rush for the single escalator down to the platform. We spot a small overlooked elevator and join a couple of other people for the ride down.
From New Haven we get a cab to Wallingford, arriving around 10:00 pm. We were happy we were able to score a spot at the small seven-room B&B Choate runs in the middle of campus – when Bree was still deciding whether to go to Choate half a year ago, Jan had booked the room for this weekend just in case. The B&B is now called the Sally Hart Lodge, but when Jan attended Choate in the 1980s, the building was known as Curtis House. The Choate headmaster and his family lived in Curtis House. Jan was in the building once when the headmaster and his wife hosted a reception for new students; Jan recognizes the old living room, probaby the only room that remains essentially the same as it was 40 years ago.
We’re just one minutes’ walk from Bree’s dorm, but it’s late so we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see her.
We run into Bree in front of Hill House. Bree’s happy to see her parents; we’re happy to see her. Today we’ll attend three of her classes. Her English teacher gives an introduction to Ralph Waldo Emerson, her History teacher leads a discussion of some American paintings from the early 1800s, and her Linear Algebra teacher discusses matrices. It’s an absolutely gorgeous fall day.
Bree is dying for food from someplace other than the campus’ temporary dining hall. The main dining hall is being remodeled, so all meals are served in the old student activities center. It doesn’t have a property kitchen and servery, so by the time food is picked up it’s already lukewarm at best. We walk into downtown Wallingford and have Italian for lunch at Michael’s.
After lunch Bree goes back to her dorm and we return to the B&B. Later we go for a pleasant walk around campus before ending up at a parent reception by the main auditorium.
Bree joins us up with us there and takes us to the adjacent arts center for a backstage tour. Deighna, the head of the drama department, lends her keys to Bree so Bree can show us one of the huge costume storage rooms. Bree’s having fun costuming both the play and the musical being put on this fall.
We walk back into town for dinner at The Library, where Bree happily eats more pasta.
We have breakfast with Bree in the temporary dining hall, then head to her Spanish and Chemistry classes. The Chemistry teacher is named Fran, and has been teaching at Choate for 40 years — she was there when Jan was, although Jan never had her as an instructor.
When classes are over we take a short ride to meet Liya at her apartment in New Haven. She’s enjoying her last fall term at Yale. We walk to lunch at Creperie Choupette, then get boba tea at the place next door. We take the train into New York City and make our way to our hotel in midtown.
Unbeknownst to Liya and Bree, Evan is flying out from California to spend the next couple of days with us. He’ll arrive just in time for our dinner reservation at Tony’s Di Napoli, so he decides to go straight to the restaurant. When we walk in, Bree and Liya are floored to see him.
Tony’s is packed on a Saturday evening before showtime, and even with a reservation there’s a wait for our table. But the service is prompt, and the food is excellent.
After dinner we walk through crowded, brightly-lit Times Square to the Music Box Theater for a performance of “Suffs”, a musical about the women’s suffrage movement. The material is interesting and the show’s enjoyable.
Four of us get up for breakfast; Evan sleeps in. We take a cab up Madison Avenue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the surface of the street has been stripped, so it feels like we’re off-roading in Manhattan.
Angela wants to see an exhibit about Christian art from Siena, Italy, so she and Jan head there while Liya and Bree explore elsewhere.
We have dim sum for lunch at Evergreen on 38th, where we’re joined by Jan’s stepsister, Anne. It’s a rare that we get a chance to catch up with Anne. After lunch Anne joins Angela and the kids for shopping at Muji while Jan goes back to the hotel.
Later Angela, Liya, and Bree go up to the New York Historical Society for an exhibit on historical women’s fashion. The exhibit is smaller than expected, and outshone by the permanent exhibit on Tiffany lamps.
Meanwhile, Jan meets up with Kathy, a friend from his teen years in New Jersey. Kathy and Jan haven’t seen each other in 40 years, so there’s a lot of catching up to do.
Dinner is at a French bistro named Benoit. The food’s quite good but not as exceptional as last night’s meal. Most interesting is that both Evan and Liya are now old enough to have wine with dinner, including a round of a Sauterne with dessert.
Bree is delighted to discover profiteroles.
Jan, Angela, Liya, and Bree have breakfast at a diner near the hotel, then take a cab down to Pier 54 on the West Side. Jan’s keen to see The Little Island, New York’s newest park, built on a set of poured concrete forms that set the park’s landscaping at different levels. It’s another sunny, warm fall day, and great to be able to enjoy it by the water.
We walk through Greenwich Village to The Strand bookstore. We meet Evan there and we all browse for a while. Afterwards Jan takes Bree and Liya next door to see Forbidden Planet, the geeky game shop and bookstore he remembers visiting as a teenager.
Lunch is at Ippudo, a ramen restaurant that turns out to serve tasty ramen with interesting flavors.
In the afternoon, Evan, Liya, and Bree all head out to spend time with friends. Evan has dinner with his friend; the rest of us meet up for dinner at Via Brazil. Afterwards we walk to the Lyceum for “Oh Mary!”, a comedy about Mary Todd Lincoln and the Lincoln assassination. It gets a lot of laughs, but mostly from swearing and raunchy humor.
Everyone heads home. Liya has a class in the late morning that she wants to attend, so we get up early to have a light breakfast at Angelina Bakery at Grand Central before dropping her off in the station.
Angela and Bree head to the hotel while Jan goes with Evan so he can get a bagel. He spends the rest of the morning working at the hotel while Jan, Angela, and Bree go shopping. Bree gets platform Mary Janes at Doc Martens, then we go back to Muji again.
The four of us reunite for lunch at a Belgian restaurant called BXL Cafe; it’s fine. We take Evan down to Penn Station for his train to the airport, then do a little more shopping with Bree at Uniqlo.
We make yet another trip to Grand Central so Bree can catch a train to New Haven, then make yet another trip to Penn Station so we can get a train to Newark for our own flight back to Seattle.