Girls Came For Vacation

Elif and Mina came for vacation on Sunday late afternoon. As is our habit, we left the dogs at home and went to Rigatoni’s for dinner. After dinner, we made a stop at Newport Creamery for some ice cream and returned home. Back at home, the dogs were waiting with lots of excitement. The bedtime came soon after we returned home, the girls were tired after a long flight.

After breakfast, Elif asked if we could go to the deli in Jamestown for lunch. We got in the car and in about 30 minutes we were in Jamestown ordering our sandwiches at the deli counter. Some people left vacating a table for us outside and we enjoyed the nice weather along with the great sandwiches. After lunch, I walked towards the pier and the girls walked to the beach to walk on sand and dip their toes in the water. After taking some photographs of them walking and other things I found interesting, I returned where we parked the car and waited for the girls to come back. That evening we were home and watched a movie.

On Tuesday evenings in the summer, the local Rotary Club organizes ‘The Cruise Nights” at Oakland Beach. Many owners of old, classic, fancy cars drive there and park their cars for everyone to enjoy. As people meander from one car to the next, the music is also blasting nostalgic tunes. We made the rounds, looked at the cars that took our fancy and ended up at Iggy’s Boardwalk restaurant. I had a nice martini as we waited for our food to arrive. Mina had Oakland Beach Burger, Jan and I had salmon on risotto, and Elif ordered linguini and clams. Her order came wrong, instead of white sauce, they brought one with red sauce. The waitress recognized the mistake and promised to replace her order in 4-5 minutes which took about 10-15! But all was good and too much. We ended up bringing half of our dishes back home.

On Wednesday morning the girls went shopping but returned earlier than I expected them, we had lunch together. Then, we decided to celebrate Elif’s birthday with dinner at Cassarino’s Ristorante on Federal Hill. As usual, we could not finish what we ordered and ended up bringing half of everything home to enjoy them today for lunch. Their food is very good and like all restaurants these days, portions are too big! That evening we watched an interesting movie, Loving Vincent, about the life of Van Gogh. The entire movie was painted animation in the style of Van Gogh using the characters and locations taken from his paintings, focusing on his final days.

Here are some photographs from our three days of vacationing with the girls.