Northeast Christmas Whirlwind – Part 1 (Phili)
The holidays were on us before I even knew what was happening. I was still stuffing Christmas cards in the mail less than 24-hours before I needed to be on the plane. I took off a half a day on Wednesday thinking this would give me more than enough time to wrap things up, pack, and even relax. I still don’t know where that time went but I was still packing Thursday morning.
Traveling was uneventful (thankfully). We always jam pack the week and it started with meeting my Uncle for dinner straight off the plane. We hadn’t seen him since his wife’s funeral so it was good to get a chance to catch up. From there it was off to Philly.
The highlight of the trip was actually going to see Longwood Gardens, where Brian’s parents volunteer every week. I was not excited about seeing this initially because I’m not really into plants. The grounds are absolutely gorgeous and the conservatory was amazing all decorated for Christmas. The Conservatory is enormous in scope with rooms that keep climate conditions perfect for all different types of plants. There was an arid desert room, a tropical room, an orchid room, and countless others.
They also had a special Christmas display of two gingerbread homes; one of the conservatories and one of the Pierce-DuPont house (more like a mansion). We had fun guessing some of the ingredients like the rice crispy grass and the cinnamon toast crunch roof. We learned that they used beet-sugar for the glass and rock candy for the porch stones.
The next day we say Brian’s grandmother in the hospital. She fell and broke her hip 3-weeks ago and was still recovering in the in-patient ward. She was in good spirits and was moving her leg around quite a bit. His grandmother is a riot. Apparently she told the doctor that she fell because she was chasing the men down the hall and tripped over her walker. She and her roommate had so much to say about the male nurses too. It was nice to see her smiling and joking.