Hooray for summer!

Do you know the best thing about summer? It's definitely not the heat! For Nick and me, it's the weekends!

I have a serious need to get out of the house and have adventures on Saturdays and Sundays during the summer, and we have kicked off the season right this year! We're a little extra motivated this year since it will be our last Philly summer for quite some time.

So, let's begin with Memorial Day weekend! I didn't take very many pictures, so the one below will have to do:
Memorial Day weekend saw our first visitors of the season! Nick's good friend David and his wife Meghann took a vacation to NYC and added a few days in Philly onto the end of their trip. We had the best time with them. We ate lots of delicious food, took them to Longwood Gardens, enjoyed some live music at a local winery, toured several historic monuments in the city, ate cheese steaks, smoked chicken legs, and even dealt with a broken AC while they were here.

It was so much fun to have them in town. The four of us just click, so everyone really enjoyed themselves.

This last weekend was seriously action-packed. On Saturday, we headed down to Chester to see the USA Sevens Rugby Tournament. My school, Temple, played three games on Saturday. Nick and I made it down in time to see Temple v. Texas.
We met up with my friend Erin, who got us our tickets for free, plus Temple t-shirts! She is awesome. See?
Just a bit later, our friend Cate and her husband Dave joined us. Here we are!
It was a gorgeous day to spend outside and to visit the Philadelphia Union stadium for the first time. See how much fun art historians can be?
Sunday was our great New Jersey adventure. I promise, it was so much fun! Nick's cousin had flown up from Florida for training for an internship. We wasn't able to come down to Philly, so we headed up there to have dinner with him. Since Nick knows of my love for adventures, he planned a whole day of it. There was much focus on food. We love food tourism!

Our first stop was at Cherry Grove Farm. I learned that Nick has a hidden talent of goat whispering. This is only one in a series of photos were Nick and this goat made friends.

Pigs wallowed:
And Nick found more goats to make friends with.
We got to sample some of their delicious cheeses and picked one out to bring home with us. After that, we headed to lunch with our good friends Joe and Anne. This couple was in our choir, and since we've finished for the season it had been ages since we'd seen them. We used to see our choir friends twice a week, so it was fabulous to catch up with them. We gorged ourselves at an incredible Indian buffet.

Fortunately, Nick and I had a little exercise planned for the middle of the day. We needed the walk after all that food! So, we headed to Grounds for Sculpture. I've been wanting to visit this place for a couple of years, so I was pleased when Nick put it on the itinerary.

We didn't get enough time there, unfortunately. We both loved it so much that I'm pretty sure we'll make it back before we head out to Rome in August.

Our last stop before meeting up with Nick's cousin was Valley Shepherd Creamery. This place was amazing. They are one of the largest sheep's milk focused farms around. We took a tour of their $3 million facility, tasted some cheeses, and learned about the difficulty of raising sheep for milk. I know this might sound weird to others, but it is exactly our sort of thing. We loved this place.

Goats and sheep getting ready for milking:
The cheese room:This lamb is only two days old!Of course, we couldn't leave without bringing home a couple of their delicious raw sheep's milk cheeses. This place was fantastic. They don't work with any distributors, so they take their cheeses to several farmers' markets in the city and in New Jersey, plus they supply several restaurants whose chefs care about good cheese. YUM.

For this upcoming weekend, we have a serious adventure planned:

I CANNOT WAIT TO BE HERE. This is the resort we'll be staying at in Cabo San Lucas. We leave on Saturday for a week-long trip. I'm so excited about relaxing by the pool, getting as much sleep as I need, reading several books for fun, and having an amazing time with our good friends Parker and Ashley. Ashley won the stay at this place in a charity auction, and the two of them invited us to come along with them! We've got a deep-sea fishing trip on the calendar, snorkeling, massages, and an in-room surf and turf dinner already set up.

Of course, there's lots to do between now and then! I've done a bit of research and asking advice on successfully vacationing on a beach with an insulin pump, but I'd love any advice from those who have done it before! I plan on keeping a cooler with me while outside and pretty much just keeping my pump inside of it. My CDE said to connect every hour to bolus what I would normally get for my basal rate, and of course I'll hook up for meals. But otherwise, the temperature will be so warm that I can't leave it outside all the time. Too bad I can't leave diabetes at home, right?

Hooray for summer! Many more adventures ahead!