New York, New York

Over Thanksgiving, we were invited to spend the weekend in Morristown, New Jersey with our friends Jodie and Adam, as guests of Jodie's parents Ed and Maretta. Morristown is only about a 1-hour train ride from New York City, so we took the opportunity to spend a couple of days in the city while we were there.

We piled in the SUV with Jodie, Adam and their Border Collie, Duncan for the approximately 7-hour drive from Cleveland to Morristown Wednesday afternoon. After a relatively uneventful drive, we arrived around 11:00 PM to some great hospitality, and a house full of dogs as Jodie's brother and his girlfriend, also staying at the house, had brought their two labs as well. Erin has been talking about having three dogs one day, and this gave us an idea of what it might be like (a little crazy, but not too bad).

Thursday is, of course, Thanksgiving in the States. It's a stroke of genius if you ask me. They get a four-day weekend out of it, while we only get a three day weekend with our Thanksgiving on a Monday. It was pretty much as advertised in TV and the movies: an entire day dedicated to nothing but lazing around the house, gorging yourself, drinking too much, watching football, and passing out from the turkey. A good time, but not something you could do every day.

On Friday, our hosts had plans to attend a concert in Morristown, so we headed out on our own to the Big Apple. Black Friday crowds meant the city was incredibly crowded, but it was still great. We arrived at Penn Station, and from there walked around mid-town, seeing sights like Times Square, the Empire State Building, Broadway and Rockefeller Center before hopping on the Subway down to Greenwich Village and the East Village. We did a little bit of shopping, stopped at a café and later a small pub before having a very nice dinner at a steakhouse in the area.

Our hosts were free on Saturday, so they took us on a little tour of more of Manhattan. We again took the train into the city and headed downtown. This time we saw Chinatown, Canal Street, Little Italy, the World Trade Center site, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Another great day in New York.

A big thanks to our hosts Ed and Maretta for welcoming us into their house for Thanksgiving, and for the Saturday tour of the city. New York is an amazing city, and not one you can do in a few days, so we're definitely planning on making a trip back, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Cleveland Rocks! (Though we haven't lived through winter yet)

It's been a couple of months since our last update. Chalk it up to us being busy settling in here in Cleveland. Here's an update on what we've been up to:

At the end of October, we moved into our new house in the Coventry Village area of Cleveland Heights, an inner-ring suburb of Cleveland. We love both the house and the area.

Moving from a one-bedroom apartment to a two-story house means that we had a LOT of furniture to get to fill up the house, and it is still half empty. We've managed to furnish most of the downstairs, including our living room, dining room and eat-in kitchen (though the living room furniture will be upgraded), but our upstairs still consists of a half-furnished bedroom (our TV is resting on two German beer crates -- very classy) and two empty bedrooms. We hope to get our guest bedroom furnished early in the new year, at which point we can comfortably host visitors.

Even though it's still unfinished, our house already feels very much like "home". It's our first house together, and we are really enjoying the experience of making it our own.

The Coventry Village area is great. It's one of the few areas in Cleveland that is walkable; there are a large number of shops, restaurants, pubs and cafés within a 5 minute walk of our house. With Christmas approaching, the trees lining the street are all lit up with lights and it is quite beautiful. We've been to a few of the restaurants and pubs, but still have a number to try. We've heard that the area is especially nice in the summer, and we're looking forward to that very much.

Other than settling in, we haven't done anything too too exciting, except for a short trip to New York and New Jersey over American Thanksgiving with our friends Jodie and Adam. We'll have a separate update on that shortly, but it was a great trip. Tomorrow morning we head to Prince George for Christmas, with a short stay in Vancouver for New Year's before we head back to Cleveland.