between there and here

so we arrived home to Chicago late on Thursday night the 27th of December and today we are relaxing in warm weather in Florida so in between we had a whirlwind couple of days of preparing for being away for three months. 

we did laundry and did catching up on work (even I did a little bit of work) we packed, we shipped boxes, we cleared as much as we could from the frig... the usual stuff...

then on the night before we left, we celebrated ringing in the New Year (OMG 2013!) at Goosefoot with Chris and Nina and a few others who were invited for the evening. 

here is the menu- and the food- following the order of the menu:

the wines we had:

then a few festive photos - a bit grainy as I used no flash...

the next day we got up and got on the road- we drove as far as about 50 miles north of Atlanta the first day.  that meant that on day two we could stop for lunch in Cordele GA for our BBQ favorite Smoakies BBQ a mile off the interstate on Cemetery Road LOL-

here are a few photos:

we arrived to the new house around 6:30 PM Wednesday night and went to pick our stuff up at the storage locker and started unpacking. The next day we went to Costco and then Friday we did grocery shopping and now we are ready to begin our Florida time. 

We started that with a trip to our favorite Italian place last night Cafe Baci - where we each had our own favorites - Veal Parm for Phil and lasagna for me-

we also got to catch up a bit with Lorraine - a buddy who works there, and Michael (one of the owners) who was just back from New Zealand as well (honeymooning!)

so soon I will be back working on the trip blog posts but meanwhile I wanted to catch up on the in between time...