End of 09, beginning of 10 visits

By Christmas night, after a bit of a train ride, we were in Washington D.C., visiting Karen's family in Arlington. One day we went to Mount Vernon, my first visit there since about 1956...Another day Bill and I went to a John Singer Sargent show at the Corcoran Gallery. Also spent some time at Eastern Market. Not too much snow there, one day was very cold and windy, though. Coming back north we stopped off in NYC as Bill was playing in a bridge tournament there--the good news, we got to stay at the Hilton again. One day got together with Gwen so we could go to the Met to see an interesting show of portraits by American painters, then off to the Via Quadronno for a yummy coffee and lunch.

In January we made a quick trip to the upper East side so we could attend Monteverdi's Vespers performed by Artek, Piffaro and Parthenia at St. Ignatius Loyola, a breathtaking event. The next day we enjoyed visiting the New York Historical Society (and I did some photocopying of genealogical materials, pages from 1860s Newark city directories--what fun!).


At the end of the month we headed off to Buffalo via Kingston and Saugerties. Left our car in the train station in Ressalaer for an afternoon train ride to the City of Light. Had a fun time with the Radoses, visiting the Talking Leaves Bookstore in the Elmwood, lunch one day with Clare at Betty's, the older kids staying overnight with us in our hotel, celebrating Frano's ninth birthday, talking with his Croatian grandparents, Frank and Novenka.

In early February the mid-Atlantic got hit with two major snowstorms, which we heard about from Karen and Fede. Our snow arrived in more reasonable amounts, along with a barred owl who spent part of one stormy day in a tree branch practically right outside our back door. And posed for me. Whoooooo are you kidding? No, he really did!