Jon and I continue to live it up on during our summer/winter of leisure. We headed to the US for our second “life of leisure” jaunt, getting back to the summer side of the equator as quickly as possible after a brief stop in Melbourne to repack. Many thanks to Tiffany, Andy, Sofia, and Riggins for hosting us and our stuff.

One big reason for heading back to the US this summer, other than it being summer of course, was to celebrate my mom’s 70th birthday with her. My sister, Alison, pulled together options among the best restaurants in DC and my mom chose the Voltaggio Brother’s Steakhouse in the MGM. We maintained our connection to Australia by dining on Wagyu from down under. Before our fabulous dinner, Jon, mom and I took advantage of the restaurant’s casino location and gambled away some money.

*a quick sorry to Lyon for never being in photos, but I blame him for always taking all the best pictures, leaving no motivation for anyone else to take pics 😉

We got in lots of additional family time, spending a week in Ocean City, MD with perfect beach weather the whole week.

I honed my mini golf and go karting skills and would have beat Jon in the former if he didn’t cheat (oh, sure, now you tell me we aren’t counting penalty strokes for hitting the ball off the course).

Jon and I continued working on our leisure sport prowess by taking our nephew Adam top golfing, bowling and more mini golfing. For me ‘prowess’ means I am about even with Adam in skill level so I will likely have to resign myself to losing soon.

Top Golf antics

Alison, Lyon and Adam introduced us to the wild and crazy world of competitive swimming. We attended our first swim meet way too early on Saturday  morning and were astonished to see so many people with elaborate setups – tents, chairs, blankets, coolers, etc. – all to watch the meet. Adam’s hard work all season paid off with him helping his team to a divisional victory. Unfortunately I was too entertained watching all the races to take any pictures.

We were excited to take in some baseball, one of our favorite parts of the North American summer, but the Washington Nationals did not cooperate. They were away for most of our time in town and while we managed to go to Nationals Stadium twice, we only saw one game and it was a loss. Boohoo.

My mom, Jon and I drove up to Binghamton, NY to see Auntie Lorrie. We didn’t waste any time before heading to an early bird dinner at a local Italian restaurant. It was delicious! The next day we had a BBQ and partook of another local delicacy, spiedies.  Eating is a great part of any trip to Bingo. I highly recommend a pit stop for pizza or spiedies if you’re in the area. Also, if you need any gossip on the neighborhood, stop by Auntie Lorrie’s.

Jon flew out to California to visit his mom. They kept busy, going to the Oakland Zoo and driving up to Lake Tahoe to see Jon’s brother Jeff. I couldn’t fathom the idea of flying again when Jon was booking the trip so I stayed in MD, but hopefully I can make it on the next CA visit.

Lucky for Jon and I, we got to go on not just one, but two fantastic boat outings. Of course the outings themselves couldn’t have been more different. One was with Colin and Brittany on their fabulous boat, ‘Blue Crush’. We tied up with a few other boats near Georgetown and enjoyed the entertainment of the local boat party crowd. The other was with the Heronimi – Becky, Rich, Haley, Seth, Tyler and Eva – a nice family outing on Deep Creek lake including some wholesome tubing fun. Becky almost managed to flip Jon off the tube.

Also lucky for us, our friends are still excited when we visit. Kate and Tom hosted a funtastic BBQ with Jen, Becca and Ron, where we got to meet some of the kiddos born since we’ve been in Australia. The Cubellos – Amanda, Kris, Zach, Tyler, and Lizzy – came over for a raucous pool party at my mom’s house.  Holly, Chris and Maeve Braly made the drive from I-town (Irvington) to Annandale, VA for a night of silliness at the Heronimi’s with Eric Popowich joining us to make things a bit less silly. Jen hosted a lovely evening with the ‘book’ club ladies – Katie and Becca with the cutie newborn Julian along.

With impeccable timing, Mike flew up from Clemson for a bit. We hit up some old haunts in Arlington together. Delhi Club still serves delicious Indian food and Taj Mahals and Fireworks, Galaxy Club and Wilson’s on Whitlows still serve up delicious beer.  Amir filled Jon in on the latest gossip and Jessica and I dined at our favorite Tyson’s Corner hot spot, Earls, which works surprisingly well for her coming from Leesburg, VA and me from Bowie, MD. A couple of times, Jon got up even earlier than his normal ridiculously early hour to golf with the Erik, Drew and Chris.

Becky and I decided to celebrate (mourn?) turning 40 this year by pretending we’re not too old to go to a Coldplay concert on a Sunday night and have a fabulous Tuesday night out at one of DC’s top restaurants, Pineapple and Pearls. The numerous course meal featured many beautiful dishes which we dutifully took pictures of, but I won’t bore you with too many.

Coldplay selfie and light show

If anyone has other pictures to share I would be super grateful. Jon and I had an amazing time catching up with as many people as possible and given our advancing age it helps to have pictures to remember everything 🙂

Laos is officially the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. I share this so you do not wonder what the heck PDR is when you see it everywhere you go in Laos as I did. And, you will go to Laos or at least you should.

Jon and I flew into Luang Prabang from Hanoi and after clearing the “arduous” customs and immigration process in the “giant” international airport, made it to our lodging right quick. Before we made it that far though we had an odd experience with an Uber. Jon ordered and Uber for us to take from our hotel in Hanoi to the airport. The airport is pretty far from downtown and I generally assume this is a good fare. However, after watching our Uber make maddeningly confusing turns seemingly away from us (why does this always seem to happen?!) he arrived only to refuse to take us to the airport because he didn’t have time. Luckily our hotel concierge was there to translate for us or we’d just think he didn’t like the look of us. Luckily our next driver was normal and happy to take us to the airport.

Luang Prabang is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with tons of Buddhist temples throughout the town. It is very picturesque with beautiful scenery and the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers. We just spent time walking around, exploring temples and views. We opted not to take one of the ubiquitous tuk tuks to see waterfalls and elephants since we had plenty of uncomfortable road trips ahead.

The first leg of our trek through Laos was a mini-bus from Luang Prabang to Vang Vieng. Everything ran on “island time” which may also be considered “third world country time” or “you have no other options so just sit back and hope you eventually get where you mean to be going time”. We were picked up at 9:50 am by tuk tuk for transport to the bus station for a 10 am bus ride after being told to be ready for pickup at 9 am. We barely fit into the tuk tuk with the passengers already there, yet our next stop was to pick up more people! Somehow they squeezed in 8 people with luggage, lots of luggage. We made it to the bus station and found that there was no need to worry about the bus leaving without us since the ridership comprised the exact ridership of our tuk tuk. Surprisingly, we actually left for Vang Vieng not long after arriving at the bus station.

I was really nervous about feeling sick on the trip because it would be on a bus on windy roads that barely count as roads. Turns out, I didn’t need to be nervous about that, but instead, I should have been more wary of our fellow bus passengers or driver or ?? We stopped briefly to use the bathroom at a lookout point and for some reason Jon and I both left our bags on the bus, something we normally don’t do, so, of course, someone, either another passenger (most likely), the bus driver or someone else at the rest stop (least likely) took money out of Jon’s bag. We probably wouldn’t have noticed, but Jon wanted to get something from his bag and noticed his hat, which had been in the bag, was now out of the bag. He immediately checked through and found $100 US missing. So, as much as we tried not to, we ended up having to pay our rube tax.

In Vang Vieng, we walked a couple of miles to our lodging just outside of the main town to work off some of the steam associated with being stolen from. By the time we got there, we were ready to relax and enjoy some Beer Lao in our lovely cottage.

We rented bikes at the hotel and took an amazing bike ride where I only cracked it/lost it for a little while. The hotel owner told us this was a “nice” ride which for some crazy reason I interpreted as meaning “not hard”. It was not only hard, but we went the opposite way around the loop we knew we were biking on so none of the landmarks made sense per the map we had. Jon figured out what had happened and calmed me down and we made it to this natural lagoon we thought we’d get to much earlier. The lagoon plus food was just the ticket to return me to full energy, enough to withstand a torrential rain, massive puddles and an incessantly bumpy rutted road all the way back.

One other thing of note in Vang Vieng, despite Laos being incredibly strict against drugs, there are pizza places that serve “happy” pizza (pizza with marijuana as a topping) and you can just order marijuana and opium to smoke from the (not so) “secret” menu. I had seen an Anthony Bourdain on Cambodia that referred to happy pizza so at least I knew it was a thing, but it was still pretty shocking to come across unintentionally as we did when craving pizza.

Our last stop in Laos was the capital, Vientiane. We took a bus from Vang Vieng to Vientiane and this time instead of having any money stolen, I just got plain old nauseous from the super bumpy bus ride on a full size bus with limited air conditioning. The highlight was our hotel pool which tells you a bit about the action in Vientiane. It’s a lovely city, there just isn’t much going on.

Laos provided so many experiences that were out of my comfort zone and I am proud to have survived all of them and even enjoyed most of them!