Happy (belated) New Year!

The holiday's kinda got in the way of my blogging, so I am going to try to give this another shot.  One thing that I find is frustrating is that I can't really decide what kind of blog I want this to be.  Do I want to focus soley on running and fitness?  Do I want to be more lifestyle related? Humor? I dunno.  So, I think it will be a hodgepodge of all sorts of things.

I'll start with one of the trips I took over the holidays.  The weekend before Chirstmas, hubs & I traveled up to Massachusettes to visit his family and have "early Christmas."  We flew Southwest out of BWI into Hartford, which is what we usually do when traveling up to Western Mass to visit the folks.

Since we got to pick our own seats and the plane was pretty empty, we took the exit row seats with extra legroom!



So much room!  I streched my legs all the way out!

We had a lovely feast and enjoyed watching the kids open their gifts.  Since one of my nieces is only 11 months old, she didn't quite get the idea of ripping open packages; but once we helped her tear off the giftwrap, she was excited to see all these new things to play with.  Apparently, both of my neices are very into Elmo, so when one started playing with her new Elmo toy, the other one dropped EVERYTHING and RAN over to where she heard the siren call of Elmo...  I guess this is when they learn the lesson of "sharing."
The following day, hubs and I wandered around Western Mass for a while seeing the "sights".



A store that sells only pet supplies and soda... niche marketing at its finest!

 Since we were meeting his Dad & Stepmom in Springfield for what I was assured would be "the best pizza I've ever had," we stopped by the Dr. Seuss Outdoor Sculpture Garden.  Did you know that Theodore Geisel (aka, Dr. Seuss) was born in Springfield, Mass and that is where the famous Mulberry Street is located?  Yep.  Well, now you do. (I happen to know a LOT of trivia about famous people/inventions/happenings in Western Mass that I've heard about over the years...)




The Lorax; he speaks for the trees




Oh the places you'll go!




Horton...



The Grinch & (poor) Max...

 After we wandered around the Sculpture Garden, we headed over to Red Rose, the mecca of pizza, I was told.  For YEARS, I have been informed that all the pizza we have been eating is "crap" or "ok" (the phrase "it's ok" is actually high praise in the pizza lexicon in our house.  Myself, being raised on Dominos and thinking that was pretty darn good, aparently has demonstrated rather pedestrian taste in pizza...)  So, whenever I would as hubs "have you ever had good pizza?" would receive a misty-eyed nostalgic response that "Red Rose in Springfield" has the best pizza ever. EVER.  So, given the opportunity, I felt like I simply had to try this.  I was worried that it had been so hyped up that it could never meet my expectations.  It did.  It was very tasty.  Unfortunately, I was so busy eating it that I failed to get a picture of it.  But trust me, it was good.  And well worth the effort it took to get it.  Now, if I could just figure out their secret and try to make it on my own so we don't have to hop on a plane or take an 8+ hour road trip everytime we get a hankerin' for really good pizza.

So, that's one thing I did over the holidays instead of blogging...