Syracuse Girls' Weekend

Life has been pretty hectic with all of our new activities. I spend a lot of time planning, running around, squeezing things in, saying "oooh - I should have done ___," and that sort of thing.  I fall asleep rehashing my day and planning the next, some sort of collision happens in my dreams between the two, and the minute I wake up I'm working out the details of those plans for the day.

This weekend, that girls' weekend that Carly, Courtney, Amanda and I have been putting on hold finally happened.  And I got to slow down for almost 48 hours in the company of friends.  Bliss.

At great time and expense to themselves, they came to Syracuse!  I am a rather obnoxious promoter of Central New York so either I convinced them it was worth the trip or they hope to eternally shut me up about it.  But Syracuse, in a rare spirit of cooperation, produced absolutely beautiful weather this weekend.

They are so beautiful, aren't they? And fashionable.  And fun. And just generally wonderful.  They are posing for the requisite Skaneateles pier picture.  Saturday, we spent pretty much all day in Skaneateles.  This is the only picture I took on Saturday.  Amanda had her camera.  When real photographers are around, I let them take the pictures.

One of the highlights of the trip was supposed to be a trip to a winery.  Since they all traveled so far and were here just a short time, I didn't want to drag them over to Keuka or even Seneca Lake.  So I thought Anyela's would nicely fit the bill.  For some odd reason, Anyela's stopped tastings early on Saturday.  So I blew that.  Thankfully, the very nice proprietor of my local wine shop humored us with our own free tasting. My friends were so nice about it, though they had to have been irritated.  They are so good to me, in so many ways.

Saturday was pretty much the day we all had together.  Amanda and Courtney came in on Thursday night, entertained themselves with thrift shopping on Friday morning while I worked, and then met me at the mall in the afternoon. For dinner, we went to my favorite Italian place, Francesca's.  The food and atmosphere (and company) were perfect.  The service was uncomfortably bad, unfortunately.  And poor Carly's plane was late due to the always awful layover at O'Hare.

We had breakfast together on Sunday morning, but Courtney and Amanda had to begin the long ride back to the Midwest.  Carly's flight left later on, so she and I scooped up Anna and went to lunch.  I introduced her to the very sinful Copper Nachos at Coppertop.  We then headed over for a lame tour by me at Syracuse University (they are much better when Jeff conducts them.  I could do good Michigan State tours, but I'm not really a frequent visitor to the SU campus).

This is the requisite visit to SU shot.  Anna being part of the picture is also requisite.  If you watch an SU game on TV, and you'll recognize this view.

We did get into some buildings that I've always wanted to see.  They've never been open when I've been visiting.  Being Sunday, the chapel was open.  It is lovely.  I'm not a good photographer, so I really didn't bother with many pictures.

Anna loved the chapel.  She thought it was beautiful and asked if we could start going to church here.  Maybe someday she'll deliver a sermon here:) Or get married here.  She said, "I probably could since I'm a professor's daughter."

We also got into the old women's school building which now houses the music department.  I wanted to see what it looked like when the sun was shining into all those stained glass windows. In a rare combination of luck, not only was the sun shining in Syracuse, but the musicians were getting out of rehearsal.  We weren't disappointed.

These kinds of weekends are so restorative.  Though when I've been playing hard, I have a bit of a rough time going back to working hard. But it's as if my soul had a spa day.