I'm in Virginia!

I'm not going to post about Coachella here. It's an awesome awesome event, and you should all learn more about it at coachella.com, but really, I have far too many travels to remember to post for things like that.

So, I wrapped up my semester, graduated from LBCC, and now I am in Virginia!

I'm on a 2-week family vacation in two parts.  The first part is a week at Massanutten Resort (pronounced mass-uh-NUT-en, not NOOT-en, like I prefer to say), which my parents got as a freebie from their membership in the Disney vacation club.  My plan is to do four posts about this part - this one, then one for each of the two day trips we will have taken,  and then a final one about our time in and around the resort.

After a FULL day of traveling (18+ hours), we got to the resort late Saturday night (May 28). The next day was my birthday(!), so we're just telling every restaurant we go to on this trip that it's my birthday.  We leave early in the morning on June 4.

The second part of the vacation will be starting that morning, when we go to Washington D.C. for a week, leaving Friday morning, June 10.  At that point, I'll do my best to post every day, as we will be cramming a LOT into each single day.

And now, a sum-up of the last few days, with some photos to liven this post up a bit!

Sunday, May 29: on my birthday, I did absolutely nothing for the first time in my working memory. The week of graduation was hectic, concluding with a rock show and coming home to shower and turn straight back out the door to the airport, so Loren (my boyfriend, who my parents have generously brought with us on this trip) and I slept well into the afternoon.  I woke up at 2:00pm to being 22 years old, and I was born at 2:22pm, so I suppose it was all meant to play out that way :) We sat around doing more nothing, went out to dinner at a terrible terrible buffet provided by the resort that will never be mentioned again (except perhaps in my resort wrap-up post), then drove up to a lookout point and walked around a bit along a nature path.  After grabbing some ice cream, we went back to the room and did even more nothing.  It was perhaps the most low-key birthday I have ever had, and I loved it.

Monday, May 30: For my birthday present, besides being on vacation, my parents paid for me and my mom to go to the spa together for both of our first-ever professional massages.  We each got a Swedish massage, and it was everything I've ever hoped for - all that homework-papers-auditions-recitals-etc. stress, finally lifted, as I realized I was truly on vacation to RELAX.  I don't really know how to relax, but I suppose this is a start.

After going out to breakfast, the four of us went to the resort's little craft fair / beer&wine tasting event. Our taste was... perhaps... "too refined for this particular event," as Loren so eloquently put it.  A couple of the beers were alright, but the wines we sampled were god-awful (one could have been a passable cough syrup).  It was definitely an experience, though, and we got some great laughs out of it.

We went in to the nearest town, Harrisonburg, for dinner.  It was has a very cute historic downtown area, which we were too late to take photos of but will be sure to do later this week.  We went to dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, Blue Nile, and it was both my mother's and Loren's first time ever having it, and my dad and I hadn't had it in years, so it was a very fun and mostly new experience figuring out how to order and tasting things for the first time... very delicious (but SPICY AS HELL) dinner.

Happy Birthday Me!

I'll do my best to catch up on the other things we're doing before we get to DC so I'll be all caught up to post daily.  I'm loving this so far... we are seeing so much of rural, small-town Virginia, and it's both exactly and nothing like I imagined.