Back to the Grind

It is weird to be back in Cleveland. Everything seems like it is moving in slow motion compared to the pace of Boston. What a great trip to the East Coast! I heard the weather here was horrible but we had beautiful weather almost everyday. It rained on our drive to Cape Cod but once we got there it was gorgeous for two days. The Cape was deserted so we had the beaches and the restaurants to ourselves.

I won’t have any of the pictures ready for a day or so but we got some amazing shots in Provincetown and in the city. It was truly an incredible vacation where we ate like kings, slept in everyday and lost track of the outside world. This is the first time I have been on-line in a week and I hardly watched any sports the whole trip. It is extremely hard to miss the Red Sox on television because they are on in every restaurant and pub. We were unable to get tickets to the baseball game. We went down to Fenway and tried but it is a good city to be a scalper—everybody wants a piece of the Red Sox. Instead of going to the game, we enjoyed a couple beers at a pub behind the Green Monster and still felt like part of Red Sox Nation for a night.

The food was incredible. My first night there I had scrod stuffed with crab in a lobster béarnaise sauce for $13 in a cute little restaurant in the North End overlooking the Harbor. In the Cape, we ate at the famous Lobster Pot where you can add a whole lobster to any entrée for $10. Eating a whole lobster was quite an experience. A few words of advice: wear the bib. The ethnic restaurants in the city were incredible. We had great Thai food, cheaper and better than what I have had in Cleveland. We also ate these Chilean sandwiches in the city that were phenomenal.

I will admit however that when we got home last night at 9:00 we did go to the Winking Lizard because we missed our wings. And smoking. We also missed smoking and having a beer in the same spot. Massachusetts is a non-smoking state which was a little hard to get used to at first. It was amazing though to be hanging out in all of these pubs and restaurants with no cigarette smoke. There is something to be said about going home and not smelling like smoke at the end of the night.

I loved the city but I just don’t think I would ever be able to afford living there. We stayed in a 950 square foot condo about 15 minutes from the city which cost our friends almost $300,000. It just amazed me how much more expensive it is to live in the city. We went to a party thrown by a girl who lived in a suite for $1000/month. This was just one room, a small kitchen and a bathroom. Of course there is also Beacon Hill right downtown where the houses, with no yard whatsoever, sell for six million dollars and up. The houses on the Cape overlooking the ocean were half this much.

Overall it was an incredible trip and I feel so well rested from my much-needed vacation. I must admit there were some things I missed back in Ohio and I was ready to come home after seven days. I should have pictures up and ready in the next few days.