Monday, May 10, 2010

Anniversary Weekend

by Eric

Karissa and I have been married for one year, one week, and one day. To celebrate our first year as husband and wife, we decided to head down to Omaha last weekend to take a break from work, Vietnam stuff, etc. and to just have fun together.

We got to Omaha around 4:00 and decided to check out Boys Town. It's a really cool place! We had two minor bummers: The Hall of History closed at 5:00, so we didn't have as much time as we would have liked to look around. And second, there was road construction, so the 'driving tour' CD we borrowed was kind of worthless.

But other than that, it was a really cool place to visit! There are over 500 kids from rough backgrounds living there. Most live in a house with 7 other kids and two 'house parents'. It's a really amazing setup! We heard a quote that the 12-18 months the average student spends at Boys Town may be the only time they ever get to experience healthy family life. Wow!


After Boys Town, we headed down to the Old Market for a fun filled evening. One of the many highlights was getting to see a violin septet! All siblings from the same family!


We chatted with the oldest kid for a while (he's actually 3rd of 12). He said they usually pull in a few hundred per weekend and that they made $700 on their best night. Hello college fund!


We also checked out a new store called The Imaginarium. Cool place with 'anything you can imagine' for sale. The guy that runs it sub-contracts out the space to 25 artists/vendors so there is no shortage of variety!


This brought back some memories of playing in my grandparent's basement! Toss Across! (or Tic-Tac-Throw if you had the generic one) I seriously thought about buying this but the idea of storing it for year(s) didn't appeal to me. If it's still for sale when we get back from Vietnam, I'll certainly reconsider!










This stroller was uber cool.
And versatile!





We ate an awesome steak dinner and walked around some more before calling it a night. Saturday we headed back downtown for the first Farmer's Market of the year. We bought some breakfast (Greek pastries and wheat bread cinnamon twists) and spent the morning looking at the produce and the people. There were plenty of free samples, so we skipped lunch and headed to the zoo!!!

Neither of us had been to the famous Henry Doorley Zoo before. We didn't try to see everything, but we certainly caught some highlights.



Karissa won the staring contest. The gorilla left a few seconds after I took this picture.












This dude was hilarious! He'd hang his hand through the fence and beg for candy, gum, etc. He was good at catching whatever people threw!








We watched the penguins for quite some time but sadly they never broke out into a tap routine.












And my favorite pic of the weekend!



Happy anniversary, Sweetie! I can't wait for our next adventure together!